Disadvantages Of Electronic Voting

The Security of Electronic Voting

To this date, a lot of controversy exists surrounding electronic voting in all its forms. During elections employing electronic voting, sometimes mysteriously votes get deducted. Or even added. Bannet et al. [1] show that these machines can, with reasonable effort, be tampered with to do exactly what an adversary wants them to do. On the other hand, Clarkson et al. [2] worked hard on creating a system that tries to defend itself from these attacks. However, they have quite a few assumptions to make the system work. Voting machines have a lot of advantages and flaws, however, solutions are being made to make them more secure.

Electronic voting machines bring a lot of advantages. First, they could be more secure than traditional paper-based methods, however, this will be discussed in paragraphs two and three. Secondly, electronic based voting is cheaper than paper based voting [2]. This is due to there being no need for as much personnel at voting stations, or even as many voting stations at all. Besides that, costs are also saved on the counting of all the votes, as all votes are stored digitally and are processed by computers. Clarkson et al. [2] estimate the cost of electronic voting to be around four cents, compared to paper-based voting at around one to three dollars. The third advantage is reliability. Computers are not only faster at counting votes, they are also less prone to make mistakes. Fourthly, a big advantage is the possibility of remote voting. Instead of having to go to a voting station to cast your vote, you could do it over the internet with your smartphone. It could also allow re-casting your vote, should you change your mind or when you have made a mistake. This could also incr...

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...ion by allowing the voter to generate fake keys, which will be accepted by the system, but be discarded during tabulation. They also employ multiple strategies to fight against virus based attacks. During tabulation, the servers are obligated to generate a proof. If any of the other servers notice that one of the proofs is fake, it will stop and force the others to stop with it. All of the results of these servers are also user-verifiable, and any voter can check if their vote has actually been submitted. To protect against viruses in the client they allow organizations to create their own version of the voting client, thus diversifying the code potential hacks would have to exploit. Another solution to this, which [2] also notes, is having the code be open-source. This allows the community as a whole to audit the code and submit potential improvements.

Conclusion