Social Technologies (Dec 2012)
Models and Principles of Designing e-Voting Systems, Ensuring its Protection
Abstract
All over the world there is one main problem for government organizations in organizing general elections or referendums. The problem is that citizens are very apathetic and their participation in elections and referendums is very low. The elections and referendums, which are based on the traditional election system, use paper ballots which are inconvenient for a lot of citizens who have election rights, because it’s not very comfortable or possible to reach voting polls on election day. In this case the participation of citizens is very low, because it’s not always possible to visit polling stations when the distance to it is quite far or citizens have no time to vote. One of the easiest ways to increase participation of citizens in the country political processes is creation of electronic voting systems that can be used to cast citizen votes both remotely or not. Because of the opinion that e-voting systems will be more convenient for voters and that this will increase voter turnout on elections and referendums, governments of some countries are trying to create and begin to use those systems in their countries’ general elections and referendums.This scientific paper represents the standards and main aspects of creation of e-voting systems, models and the main threats to electronic voting systems. It discusses system attack methods and people who are interested in compromising e-voting systems. Also it analyses the practice of using e-voting systems for elections and referendums in some world countries.
