Transforming voting paradigm — The shift from inline through online to mobile voting

Abstract

Traditional poll-site voting methods poise multiple administrative and logistical challenges inter alia scalability, cost and miscount. Moreover, there is a noticeable decline in the turnout rate of eligible voters, particularly the youth. This work proposes a novel mobile voting model that uses common-off-the-shelf (COTS) mobile phones, in conjunction with a Near Field Communication (NFC) tag technology and a pragmatic biometric verification scheme. The mobile voting application being proposed in this work is launched by leveraging the auto-coupling capability of NFC, which also serves for storing baseline information about voters. The auto-coupling feature mediates device familiarity requirement, which is a limiting factor for using mobile phones to administer elections satisfying transparency and ease of use. The baseline information stored in the NFC tag provides local biometric reference data that mediate intensive bandwidth consumption, computational requirement, provide for match-on-a-card features and satisfy the constraint that only the eligible voter may vote. This work notes all security requirements for this model and addresses some architecture, design and security issues that will arise if such a choice is made.