Study on poll-site voting and verification systems

Abstract

Voting is an important part of the democratic process. The electorate makes a decision or expresses an opinion that is accepted by everyone. However, some individual or group may be interested in tampering with the elections process to force an outcome in their favor. Hence, controlling the whole voting process to ensure that it is performed correctly and according to current rules and law is, then, even more important. In this work, we present a review of existing verification systems for paper-based and electronic voting systems in supervised environments, from both academic and commercial worlds. To do so, we perform a fair comparison of a set of representative voting verification systems using an evaluation framework. We define this framework to be composed of several properties, covering important system areas, ranging from user interaction to security issues. Then, we model the natural evolution of verifiability issues on notable voting systems from academia and commerce which are influenced by restrictions on current laws and by the advance of technology.