Electronic Voting - A Survey

As the world watched the electoral drama unfold in Florida at the end of 2000, people started wondering, “Wouldn’t all our problems be solved if they just used Internet Voting?”. People all over the world soon started taking a hard look at their voting equipment and procedures, and trying to figure out how to improve them [1]. There is a strong inclination towards moving to Remote Internet Voting – at least among the politicians – in order to enhance voter convenience, increase voter confidence and voter turnout. However, as will be seen later in this paper, there are serious technological and social aspects that make Remote Internet Voting infeasible in the visible future. Therefore, many technologists have suggested that remote poll-site electronic voting, where the voter can vote at any poll-site (not only his home county poll-site), seems to be the best step forward as it provides better voter convenience, but at the same time, does not compromise security. This paper presents a survey of the state of the art in Electronic Voting, including the various works done in Internet Voting (and the arguments against its use), as well as in electronic poll-site voting.