Secure Internet Voting System

Abstract

Voting is a fundamental action of a democracy which is used to minimize the discrepancy between the ideas of a community. Evolution of voting begins from raising hands. It evolved through the paper ballot voting systems and the most recent invention in the area of casting ballots is e-voting. Using electronic voting, voters can submit their ballots electronically. It can be done by using either direct record electronic voting machines, touch screens, optical scanners, punch card systems or internet voting. In taking this evolution of voting systems a step further, this research proposes a mechanism for a secure internet voting system. A voting system should satisfy several features such as democracy, anonymity, auditability, veri ability and accuracy. Other than these factors, internet voting system has an additional feature called mobility. In order for anonymity to hold true, i.e. nobody can trace back the vote to its voter, there is a necessity of not having a link between the voter and his vote. On the other hand, veri ability de nes that there should be a way for the voter to con rm whether his/her vote was counted correctly or not. There is a con ict between solutions to anonymity and veri ability. This project presents a voting protocol which satis es the aforementioned features of the voting system including a solution to the con ict between anonymity and veri ability. A combination of blind signature and public key system is used to implement the voting protocol.