Remote Internet voting: developing a secure and efficient frontend

Abstract

Electronic voting is an essential component of the e-governance of a country for establishing the people’s choice in selecting the political leadership. Poll station voting is generally considered to be the most successful form of the election process. Both traditional and electronic versions of the poll station voting had many implementations in general elections, worldwide. The remote poll station voting scheme allows voters to participate in the election process if they have an access to any one of the poll station, no matter where they are at the time of voting. However, this scheme suffers from declining participation due to the inconvenience to the voters in reaching the poll stations. Also, this scheme needs a secure, private network for connecting the poll stations, making it very expensive. The remote Internet voting is very user convenient, which allows voting from any Internet connected computer, from anywhere. However, security, reliability and complexity issues have restricted the wider adoption of this scheme in large-scale elections. This paper proposes a secure and efficient frontend voting protocol using a trusted platform module for remote Internet voting with trusted third party authentication protocol.