Elections are the founding stone of healthy democracy ensuring the rights of Citizens to elect their representatives as per their wish and will. Based on the opinion of the general public, representatives are elected to serve the needs of the people. The voting process must be transparent, reliable and fair as it determines the future of any Country by entrusting huge responsibilities on elected representatives to govern the people. With the increase in population, the traditional form of election involving ballot paper and manual counting of votes found to be insufficient as it involves lengthier procedure, costlier, delay in time and suffers from risk of bias. Thus e-voting replaced the traditional form of elections ensuring transparency, faster procedure, economically cheaper and protecting privacy, security of the voters in today’s modern World.
E-voting or electronic voting is a system of conducting elections through an electronic medium. It is suitable for conducting large scale elections with minimum expense and faster procedure of counting votes. The first Country to come up with an online voting system was Estonia in 2005. In most of the Countries EVM’s are used for conducting fair elections. However, the e-voting system suffers from concerns of security, reliability, privacy and transparency.
Types of E-voting Systems
Internet voting system provides voting facility to the people in virtual mode through voting websites, bar codes, OTP system which enables the people to cast their votes where internet facility is available. The voter without travelling to their respective voting booths can cast their votes using this technology. However, the adequate knowledge of using internet facilities must be known to people and where communication is feasible. This technology suffers from risk of security, privacy and absence of control by election authorities on the voters while casting their votes are the major concerns involved in it. Some of the e-voting systems models include :
E-voting using blind signature: This system of e-voting was introduced by Chaum in 1983 in which a voter can cast his vote by digitally signing a document by verifying the public key and private key. The major advantage of this system is that the election authorities could be able to verify and authenticate the identity of the voters which enables only eligible voters to cast their votes. But in this technology the identity of the voters couldn’t be traced after casting their respective votes.
E-voting using Homomorphic Encryption: Here the system works on the homomorphic operation where the voters have to verify their identity using public key homomorphic expression and votes are further added to the final tally by decryption. It provides efficient results and is secure to adopt. But this system suffers from scalability due to its limited application.
E-voting using Mixnets: This system secures privacy of the voters by using a device called Mix which encrypts the input and output by enveloping a mix server that protects the identity of the voters who cast their votes by encryption function. The objective behind this technology is to protect the identity of the voters while counting the votes. However, the system remains untraceable when there is mismatch of serves involved in the operations.
Advantages of E-voting system
E-voting systems are preferable and adoptable than traditional form of voting systems due to its merits which is suitable for modern World. Electronic voting provides the secure and faster procedure of election results. It minimizes the human error and enables accurate recording of votes. It is suitable for conducting elections at larger scale and it avoids delay in conducting elections which enables the voters to cast their vote via internet medium, thereby avoiding movement of people to voting booths. Another advantage of e-voting technology is that it verifies and authenticates the identity of voter by checking the eligibility as prescribed by election authorities by keeping away ineligible voters from casting voting. The expense of election staff and voting process will be reduced by e-voting facilities, thus saving the taxpayers money from election expenses. The voting process will be simpler as huge number of people can cast their votes simultaneously less than in one minute. This technology reduces the dependency of paper-based election system. Hence, it is eco-friendly and cuts down the expenses of voters to visit their respective voting booths.
Challenges of E-voting system
One of the prominent challenges facing the e-voting system is Security and reliability. Today the Cyber attacks and malwares are reducing the confidence of the people in the transactions carried out via the internet. The fairness of elections is only possible if the electoral procedure is transparent and secure. Likewise, the protection of confidential information of voters and their privacy must be ensured for conducting fair electronic elections. The issues of security in computer systems during elections is the major concern for election authorities.
Another problem with e-voting is that the majority of the people must have good access to internet facilities and they must have enough knowledge about the usage of the electoral process. Sometimes the problem in servers and voting networks may be affected due to traffic of data or malfunctions in system or poor climatic conditions, in such cases the task of restoring the network becomes a difficult task for the authorities due to the prescribed time limit for elections. The protection of personal confidential data of voters becomes a significant duty of electoral officers during electronic voting systems. These are the present challenges to be addressed in coming days through developing efficient and transparent electoral systems.
The Way Forward
With on-going research and developments in establishing efficient, secure and transparent e-voting systems is a never ending process. Nevertheless, the efforts of transforming the traditional election process to electronic voting system has taken place which reduced the heavy expenses of elections and time delay. As per the experts, Blockchain technology could be used for e-voting processes as it increases the reliability, security and confidentiality of data as compared with other technologies. However, the adoptability of such technology still remains in question due to some limitations.
By: Vaishakh V Kulkarni
(Team Member, WCSF)
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