Integrating e-Voting and Traditional Voting Systems

Vienna.
The final speaker in this EDEM 2009 session is Vitaliy Lipen from the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, who shifts our interest to the remote verification of electronic voting. There has been a substantial amount of work done on systems for electronic voting in Belarus already,and such systems have been trialled in a number of countries (for example in Kazachstan, if less so in Belarus itself).

There is only moderate readiness for full e-voting implementation in Belarus and other countries of the former Soviet Union, due to the limited infrastructure, and this compares also with other nations with infrastructural deficits. Even so, Kazachstan showed a 30% patricipation rate for e-voting,which compares favourably with more ICT-developed nations such as Estonia (where 7% of the population voted electronically) or Germany (where the electronic vote trial in 2005 was annulled subsequently). Electors remain concerned about their privacy, and electronic elections tend to offer even less transparency than traditional paper ballots; however, the paper voting trail is difficult for voters to track, too.

Modern (e-)voting systems should provide indedendent outside systems for electronic supervision of the process; different voting modes (paper, online) should provide a single secure elector identifier; elector registration data and anonymous voting results should be recorded and presented online after the election; any elector should be able to verify their registration at the election and the submission of their vote; and remote observers need to be able to monitor the election and vote tallying process.

The integrated electronically coordinated voting framework proposed here, then, should include a secure ID generation and storage system, a verification centre, an e-voting portal, and an election monitoring portal, and this electronic system would be integrated with existing postal distribution and processing systems (distributing election invitations and processing postal votes), physical polling stations, and remote observer organisations. Vitaliy is now presenting some detailed organisational charts, and even an architectural model for the polling stations themselves. An experimental system built on this basis is already online, and Vitaliy now takes us through screenshots from a trial run.

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