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

<p>This research sought to understand the nature of election-related conflict and what needs to be done to arrest the eruption of such conflict in Lesotho. It sought the opinions of selectively respondents who have been involved in the conflicts in different ways. The interviews and documented literature revealed that what constitutes a background to election-related conflict involves issues that are many and varied. Among others such issues include the following: weak political institutions, use of vulgar language by political leadership, and the weak economy that intensifies neo-patrimonial tendencies. The research concluded that all the factors associated with the eruption of illegitimate conflicts during and after general elections in Lesotho are a result of the politicians&rsquo / desire to retain or capture national resources to satisfy their selfish interests and those of their cronies. The conflicts could be minimised if the country&rsquo / s economy could be transformed to provide the politicians with alternatives of economic survival outside the structures of government. Furthermore, to minimise the conflict, the country should consider establishing electoral courts. These have the potential of speeding up the resolution of electoral grievances, in the process preventing them from graduating into serious conflicts.</p>

<p>This research sought to understand the nature of election-related conflict and what needs to be done to arrest the eruption of such conflict in Lesotho. It sought the opinions of selectively respondents who have been involved in the conflicts in different ways. The interviews and documented literature revealed that what constitutes a background to election-related conflict involves issues that are many and varied. Among others such issues include the following: weak political institutions, use of vulgar language by political leadership, and the weak economy that intensifies neo-patrimonial tendencies. The research concluded that all the factors associated with the eruption of illegitimate conflicts during and after general elections in Lesotho are a result of the politicians&rsquo / desire to retain or capture national resources to satisfy their selfish interests and those of their cronies. The conflicts could be minimised if the country&rsquo / s economy could be transformed to provide the politicians with alternatives of economic survival outside the structures of government. Furthermore, to minimise the conflict, the country should consider establishing electoral courts. These have the potential of speeding up the resolution of electoral grievances, in the process preventing them from graduating into serious conflicts.</p>

Magister Artium - MA / This research sought to understand the nature of election-related conflict and what needs to be done to arrest the eruption of such conflict in Lesotho. It sought the opinions of selectively respondents who have been involved in the conflicts in different ways. The interviews and documented literature revealed that what constitutes a background to election-related conflict involves issues that are many and varied. Among others such issues include the following: weak political institutions, use of vulgar language by political leadership, and the weak economy that intensifies neo-patrimonial tendencies. The research concluded that all the factors associated with the eruption of illegitimate conflicts during and after general elections in Lesotho are a result of the politicians' desire to retain or capture national resources to satisfy their selfish interests and those of their cronies. The conflicts could be minimised if the country's economy could be transformed to provide the politicians with alternatives of economic survival outside the structures of government. Furthermore, to minimise the conflict, the country should consider establishing electoral courts. These have the potential of speeding up the resolution of electoral grievances, in the process preventing them from graduating into serious conflicts. / South Africa

Digitalization has led to the development of electronic voting systems, which in turn influences electoral integrity. Since the fairness of elections plays such an important part for democracy, the security aspects that keep an election's integrity and fairness are of great importance and thus, is the objective of this research. The research question this study aims to answer is “What security differences and / or similarities can be identified between End-to-End and blockchain-based voting systems?”. A comparative systematic literature review was done in order to answer the research question, which started by finding relevant literature needed for the analysis. After identifying the necessary articles, advantages and disadvantages for End-to-End and blockchain-based voting systems were outlined and then compared in a truth table (table 5). The results showed that the two systems share similar characteristics such as: verifiability, voter anonymity / ballot secrecy, integrity and the lack of scalability. Whereas the main differences are found in relation to how susceptible each system is to attacks. This leads to the conclusion that the biggest difference identified between blockchain-based and End-to-End systems is their susceptibility to attacks.

In this thesis, we construct an algebraic framework for analyzing committee elections. In this framework, module homomorphisms are used to model positional voting procedures. Using the action of the wreath product group S2[Sn] on these modules, we obtain module decompositions which help us to gain an understanding of the module homomorphism. We use these decompositions to construct some interesting voting paradoxes.

Nous étudions la manipulation par coalition des modes de scrutin: est-ce qu'un sous-ensemble des électeurs, en votant de façon stratégique, peut faire élire un candidat qu'ils préfèrent tous au candidat qui aurait été vainqueur si tous les électeurs avaient voté sincèrement? D'un point de vue théorique, nous développons un formalisme qui permet d'étudier tous les modes de scrutin, que les bulletins soient des ordres de préférences sur les candidats (systèmes ordinaux), des notes ou des valeurs d'approbation (systèmes cardinaux) ou des objets encore plus généraux. Nous montrons que pour la quasi-totalité des modes de scrutin classiques, on peut réduire strictement leur manipulabilité en ajoutant un test préliminaire visant à élire le vainqueur de Condorcet s'il en existe un. Pour les autres modes de scrutin, nous définissons la condorcification généralisée qui permet d'obtenir des résultats similaires. Puis nous définissons la notion de culture décomposable, une hypothèse dont l'indépendance probabiliste des électeurs est un cas particulier. Sous cette hypothèse, nous prouvons que, pour tout mode de scrutin, il existe un mode de scrutin qui est ordinal, qui partage certaines propriétés avec le mode de scrutin original et qui est au plus aussi manipulable. Ainsi, la recherche d'un mode de scrutin de manipulabilité minimale (dans une classe de systèmes raisonnables) peut être restreinte à ceux qui sont ordinaux et vérifient le critère de Condorcet. Afin de permettre à tous d'examiner ces phénomènes en pratique, nous présentons SVVAMP, un package Python de notre cru dédié à l'étude des modes de scrutin et de leur manipulabilité. Puis nous l'utilisons pour comparer la manipulabilité par coalition de divers modes de scrutin dans plusieurs types de cultures, c'est-à-dire des modèles probabilistes permettant de générer des populations d'électeurs munis de préférences aléatoires. Nous complétons ensuite l'analyse avec des élections issues d'expériences réelles. Enfin, nous déterminons les modes de scrutin de manipulabilité minimale pour de très faibles valeurs du nombre d'électeurs et du nombre de candidats et nous les comparons avec les modes de scrutin classiques. De manière générale, nous établissons que la méthode de Borda, le vote par notation et le vote par assentiment sont particulièrement manipulables. À l'inverse, nous montrons l'excellente résistance à la manipulation du système appelé VTI, également connu par son acronyme anglophone STV ou IRV, et de sa variante Condorcet-VTI. / We investigate the coalitional manipulation of voting systems: is there a subset of voters who, by producing an insincere ballot, can secure an outcome that they strictly prefer to the candidate who wins if all voters provide a sincere ballot? From a theoretical point of view, we develop a framework that allows us to study all kinds of voting systems: ballots can be linear orders of preferences over the candidates (ordinal systems), grades or approval values (cardinal systems) or even more general objects. We prove that for almost all voting systems from literature and real life, manipulability can be strictly diminished by adding a preliminary test that elects the Condorcet winner if one exists. Then we define the notion of decomposable culture and prove that it is met, in particular, when voters are independent. Under this assumption, we prove that for any voting system, there exists a voting system that is ordinal, has some common properties with the original voting system and is at most as manipulable. As a consequence of these theoretical results, when searching for a voting system whose manipulability is minimal (in a class of reasonable systems), investigation can be restricted to those that are ordinal and meet the Condorcet criterion.In order to provide a tool to investigate these questions in practice, we present SVVAMP, a Python package we designed to study voting systems and their manipulability. We use it to compare the coalitional manipulability of several voting systems in a variety of cultures, i.e. probabilistic models generating populations of voters with random preferences. Then we perform the same kind of analysis on real elections. Lastly, we determine voting systems with minimal manipulability for very small values of the number of voters and the number of candidates and we compare them with classical voting systems from literature and real life. Generally speaking, we show that the Borda count, Range voting and Approval voting are especially vulnerable to manipulation. In contrast, we find an excellent resilience to manipulation for the voting system called IRV (also known as STV) and its variant Condorcet-IRV.

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.