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.

Voting enables certain formal decisions to be made through the participation of a given population; and it is the vital part of a democratic process. The method of voting used in South Africa (SA) today is derived from the Australian ballot system. This paper-based voting system, however, is slow, convoluted and inaccurate because of human errors; it is costly and largely inefficient. In the early 1900s, election officials overwhelmingly decided to use electronic voting (E-voting) systems to solve some of the problematic issues of paper-based voting systems. Mobile voting (M-voting) is a subset of E-voting; and it allows citizens to use their mobile phones to cast their votes. Very few countries have endeavoured to implement M-voting, in order to improve mobility and simplify the election procedures. Despite several M-voting initiatives reported worldwide; insufficient attention has been devoted to understanding the factors that influence the success or failure of M-voting implementation. It is also important to note that the implementation of M-voting may be very difficult; if the different modalities that aid successful M-voting implementation are not in place. This study seeks to develop a framework that has the potential to enable the successful implementation of M-voting in SA. The proposed framework is an IT artefact that endeavors to improve human experiences for voting. This study followed a Design-Science approach; and it made use of a case study to collect the data via a literature review, observations, questionnaires, focus groups and expert reviews. The study revealed that there is no institutional, legal and regulatory framework for the proliferation of M-voting in SA. Successful M-voting implementation depends on a compendium of factors, which may be unique in the local context where it is implemented. The framework that resulted from the above was assessed for validity and applicability; after which a modified framework was presented. The research concludes with specific implementation guidelines, as well as areas for future research.

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Technology: Information Technology, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2015. / This thesis focuses on the development of an enhanced innovative secure mobile Internet voting system architecture that offers desirable security requirements to theoretically mitigate some of the intrinsic administrative and logistical challenges of voting, inter alia lack of mobility support for voters, voter inconvenience, election misconduct, and possible voter coercion often associated with the conventional poll-site voting system. Systems in existence have tended to revolve around the need to provide ubiquitous voting, but lack adequate control mechanism to address, in particular, the important security requirement of controlling possible coercion in ubiquitous voting. The research work reported in this thesis improves upon a well-developed Sensus reference architecture. It does so by leveraging the auto-coupling capability of near field communication, as well as the intrinsic merits of global positioning system, voice biometric authentication, and computational intelligence techniques. The leveraging of the combination of these features provides a theoretical mitigation of some of the security challenges inherent in electoral systems previously alluded to. This leveraging also offers a more pragmatic approach to ensuring high level, secure, mobile Internet voting such as voter authentication. Experiments were performed using spectral features for realising the voice biometric based authentication of the system architecture developed. The spectral features investigated include Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Mel-frequency Discrete Wavelet Coefficients (MFDWC), Linear Predictive Cepstral Coefficients (LPCC), and Spectral Histogram of Oriented Gradients (SHOG). The MFCC, MFDWC and LPCC usually have higher dimensions that oftentimes lead to high computational complexity of the pattern matching algorithms in automatic speaker authentication systems. In this study, higher dimensions of each of the features were reduced per speaker using Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) algorithm, while neural network ensemble was utilised as the pattern-matching algorithm. Out of the four spectral features investigated, the LPCC-HOG gave the best statistical results with an R statistic of 0.9257 and Mean Square Error of 0.0361. These compact LPCC-HOG features are highly promising for implementing the authentication module of the secure mobile Internet voting system architecture reported in this thesis. / D

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Technology: in Information Technology in the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology Supervisor: Dr Ephias Ruhode Cape Town campus December 2013 / The use of ICTs such as computers, electronic databases and other technologies have been in use for a number of years within the public sector to organise, manage and disseminate information to the public as well as to facilitate day-to-day communication in government offices. In this context, the value of the use of ICTs has been to assist and streamline government operations. The technological development in South Africa has opened up the possibilities of the use of ICTs in the democratic and governance process. E-democracy has been defined as a tool for abandoning the representative system for one with more direct citizen engagement. This study sets out to explore the challenges of the current electoral process, and also determine the factors that could influence the adoption and diffusion of e-voting technologies within the South African context. Literature has shown that countries such as Brazil and India have successfully implemented electronic voting systems and other countries are at various piloting stages to address many challenges and problems associated with manual paper based system such as costs of physical ballot paper and other overheads, electoral delays, distribution of electoral materials, and general lack of confidence in the electoral process. It is in this context that the study also seeks to determine whether the South African electoral management body can leverage on the opportunities that e-voting presents. However, with all the benefits that e-voting presents, there are countries such Germany, the Netherlands etc. that have tried and tested e-voting systems and decided to abandon these system to go back to the manual paper ballot voting systems because of various reasons ranging from cost, security and verifiability. This research is exploratory in nature and adopts qualitative research approach and it is within the interpretivism paradigm. Survey and interview strategies were used to collect data. A purposive sampling method was used to select the participants for the survey. To gain an understanding of the views of voters and electoral management body (IEC) about the current electoral process and e-voting technologies, literature was explored, a questionnaire was distributed online to voters and an in-depth semi-structured interview was conducted with the IEC. The study targeted voters who had access to the internet since the survey questionnaire was distributed online. The analysis is based on thematic analysis and diffusion of innovation (DoI) theory was also used to provide an analytical framework for the study. Through this framework the aims and objectives of the study were conceptualized around three constructs from the theory (relative advantage, compatibility and complexity). The findings of the study revealed that the three constructs from the DoI framework are important factors that may influence the adoption process of e-voting technologies. The findings also revealed other factors such as availability of ICT enable infrastructure and resources, digital divide, trust in technology, awareness of the technology and environment could that also influence the adoption process. The contributions of this research are anticipated to be a better understanding of the adoption of e-voting technologies in South Africa. For the electoral management bodies, the contribution of this research is that the research to some extent portrays factors that could influence the adoption of e-voting technologies in South Africa. Therefore, findings such as availability of ICT infrastructure and accessibility of these infrastructures should be taken into consideration before introducing e-voting technologies. Keywords: DoI (diffusion of Innovation), e-voting (electronic voting) technologies, E-governance, e-participation.