University of Basque Country Research Proposes Improvements for Electronic Voting by Internet Basque Research (11/09/09) Bulegoa, Prentsa
as it appeared in the November 11, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews.
The democratic process can be augmented by information and communications technologies that increase public engagement, says University of Basque Country researcher Maider Huarte Arrayago, who did her doctoral work on systems for electronic voting via the Internet. Arrayago's study of online electronic voting systems revealed that such systems fulfill the requirements of equality and secrecy very well, while universal suffrage and liberty are not as well represented. To comply with the requirements of liberty, Arrayago proposed the enhancement of the voting system's reliability and flexibility. Facilitating universal suffrage, meanwhile, would involve both defining a human-machine interface that accounts for the heterogeneity of the voters' capacities and boosting the mobility of electors without impairing communication protocols. Arrayago's proposed system improves reliability by only maintaining the secrecy of the passwords to be used in the protocols, which reinforces robustness, transparency, and the lodging of complaints in private. To promote more flexibility, Arrayago defined systems and protocols that do not impact the digital paper-vote format and the count methodology, while permitting the reader to interrupt the vote-casting process at any time and start over. To achieve compliance with the universal suffrage precept, Arrayago suggested the augmentation of both existing and future interfaces. She concluded that the cryptographic methods used to satisfy the equality and secrecy requirements restricted certain characteristics of the liberty principle, while existing security techniques and tools or their use are insufficient if the software is not properly crafted.View Full Article
