E-Voting Systems to Facilitate Elections in Iraq

Abstract

Electronic voting (e-voting) is replacing the paper-based election system gradually in many developing and developed countries throughout the globe. Many devices emerged to be used in different e-voting systems, starting from the punch-card machines at the polling station ending with using the PCs at home. At present, elections in Iraq are carried out through the deployment of the traditional classic paper based election system. It is plagued by many challenges mainly the long period of tallying time, possibility of practicing many kinds of fraud as well as tampering the results. The aim of this paper is to identify the most suitable e-voting machine to be utilized in elections in Iraq. Different e-voting machines and systems have been examined in details and a comparison has been done based on a set of criteria. The criteria have been formed in the light of e-voting functional and security requirements. As per the comparison, it has been concluded that the stand-alone Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) associated with a printer and a bio-metric identification verification device, meets to large extent the e-voting system requirements and can facilitate the implementation of e-voting process in Iraqi elections.