Zugl.: Koblenz, Landau (Pfalz), Univ., Diss., 2008 / Includes bibliographical references.

Internetwahlen (e-Voting) sind zu einer realen Möglichkeit geworden,es müssen aber die allgemeinen Wahlrechtsgrundsätze eingehalten werden.Bei der Entwicklung eines e-Voting-Systems müssen insbesondere folgende Probleme gelöst werden: eindeutige Identifikation des Wahlberechtigten bei der Registration für die elektronische Wahl bei gleichzeitig vollkommen gesicherter Anonymität in der Stimmabgabe. Außerdem darf die Systemadministration der Wahlbetreiber keinerlei Möglichkeit haben (i) die Anonymität zu unterlaufen oder (ii) Stimmen zu manipulieren. Der vorliegende Prototyp basiert auf einem an der Abteilung Produktionsmanagement der WU Wien entwickelten Verfahren,das international publiziert und damit der öffentlichen Diskussion und Prüfung zugänglich ist (siehe dazu die Auswahl an Publikationen in diesem Bericht). / Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operations

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, March 2007.

Diss. Univ. Zürich, 2004.

An election is a core part of any global democracy. Elections provide citizens with the opportunity to voice their opinions. South Africa achieved democracy for the first time in 1994 and has had four successful national elections since then. All of these elections have been declared “free and fair” according to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). However, there have been various challenges facing the current South African electoral process. This research, therefore examines alternative methods to improve the current South African electoral process. This research firstly identifies the various challenges and characteristics associated with the current electoral process in South Africa. This research study proposes, to incorporate Information and Communication Technology (ICT) into the South African electoral process. Thus, arguing that utilizing ICT could potentially improve the process. Various countries worldwide have investigated different methods to improve their electoral processes. Countries such as India, Brazil, Estonia and the USA have incorporated ICT into their electoral processes, known as electronic voting (e-voting). Therefore, this research study investigates countries such as India, Brazil, Estonia and the USA which opted to implement e-voting into their electoral process. In addition, various e-voting technologies and their capabilities are explored in detail in this research study. The conclusions drawn from the examination of the electoral processes of countries that utilize e-voting, contributed to the achievement of the primary objective in this research. As a result, to address the various challenges facing the current electoral process in South Africa, a process model was developed called an E-voting Process Model, which depicts two electoral processes namely, an optical scan polling station voting process and an online voting process. This research argues that the E-voting Process Model could potentially improve the current electoral process in South Africa.

This thesis describes the design of a novel class of pollsterless voting schemes. Many cryptographic voting schemes necessitate a pollster because the client side computations are beyond the understanding or ability of the voter. Such interactions require that the voter trust the software to perform operations on their behalf, and in effect, the pollster acts as the voter. Conversely, the pollsterless schemes presented here permit voters to interact with an election authority directly, without complex computations. Pollsterless schemes have the additional advantage of permitting voting on virtually any networked device, increasing the potential mobility of voting. The proposed pollsterless schemes are implemented and then evaluated with respect to the particular requirements of the UK public election context. The flexibility of pollsterless schemes in particular are demonstrated to fulfill the diverse requirements that may arise in this context, whilst the mobility of pollsterless schemes is demonstrated to fulfill requirements to improve the convenience of voting.

The automation of the election process has been experimented in many countries during recent years, to demonstrate that it accelerates the election process and that it offers many advantages; however, such automation also needs to satisfy many security requirements to guarantee a transparent process. In this dissertation, a model for an electronic voting system is proposed. This model focuses on the security risks and the vulnerabilities associated to these processes. As in any election process, electronic voting needs to meet the appropriate standards regarding the basic principles and attributes of a good democratic election. In this study, the principles considered as the basic requirements for electronic voting, are analyzed and included in the proposed model. This dissertation discusses the Brazilian case for being the first country in the world where a 100% of the citizens voted electronically. It also presents other experiences related to Direct Recording Electronic voting in other countries in order to compare and critically analyze the different models. The best features of each model are taken and examined in order to propose secure electronic elections that maintain the selected principles as key requirements. / Dissertation (MIT)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Computer Science / unrestricted

End-to-end verifiable election systems (E2E systems) provide a provably correct tally while maintaining the secrecy of each voter's ballot, even if the voter is complicit in demonstrating how they voted. Providing voter incoercibility is one of the main challenges of designing E2E systems, particularly in the case of internet voting. A second challenge is building deployable, human-voteable E2E systems that conform to election laws and conventions. This dissertation examines deployability, coercion-resistance, and their intersection in election systems. In the course of this study, we introduce three new election systems, (Scantegrity, Eperio, and Selections), report on two real-world elections using E2E systems (Punchscan and Scantegrity), and study incoercibility issues in one deployed system (Punchscan). In addition, we propose and study new practical primitives for random beacons, secret printing, and panic passwords. These are tools that can be used in an election to, respectively, generate publicly verifiable random numbers, distribute the printing of secrets between non-colluding printers, and to covertly signal duress during authentication. While developed to solve specific problems in deployable and incoercible E2E systems, these techniques may be of independent interest.

Author discuss legal, technical, security and operational aspects of e-voting, especially of i-[nternet]-voting. Author finds lots of problems in identification process, internet security and anonymity, trustiness of electronic form. He analyzes i-voting projects of European countries, Council of Europe specialists’ recommendation Rec (2004)11, and summaries information of Electronic Voting in Europe: Technology, Law and Politics conference, and International Recht Informatiks Symposium in Austria 2004. He looks forward for installing of i-voting in Lithuania.

Electronic citizen participation has become a realistic option on all levels. Electronic participation includes: (i) citizen information systems about political decision making and law making, such as parlinkom.gv.at; (ii) discussion and deliberation platforms; and (iii) direct decision making in electronic voting, which is the focus of this research project. The high level of international experience in the field of electronic voting has been encouraging. In a semi-nal contribution, the Council of Europe published a set of minimum requirements for the legal, opera-tional and technical design of electronic voting sys-tems [CoE2004]. There is an ever-increasing number of pilot projects been conducted in several European countries. Practical experience is needed, not only to test the technology, but also to test the usability and user acceptance of such systems. This was the main ob-jective of this test. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operations