Electronic voting systems, in different countries.

Introduction

Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) system is a simple electronic voting process. In this system, an electronic voting device is used to record votes in place of ballot papers and boxes which were used earlier in the conventional voting systems. The fundamental right to vote or simply voting in elections forms the basis of democracy. In all earlier elections be it state elections or Centre elections a voter used to cast his/her favorite candidate by putting the stamp against his/her name and then folding the ballot paper as per a prescribed method before putting it in the Ballot Box. This is a long, time-consuming process and very much prone to errors. This situation continued tithe ll election scene was completely changed by electronic voting machines. No more ballot paper, ballot boxes, stamping, etc. all this condensed into a simple box called the ballot unit of the electronic voting machine. Because biometric identifiers cannot be easily misplaced, forged, or shared, they are considered more reliable for person recognition than traditional token or knowledge-based methods. So, the electronic voting system has to be improved based on the current technologies viz., biometric system. This article discusses the complete analysis of the electronic system in different countries, their issues, and a comparison among the voting methods and biometric EVM.

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Analysis of electronic voting systems in various countries

 Recently, the urge for e-voting has been described to be the inevitable future of electioneering in many countries across the world. Few countries have legally adopted the use of e-voting systems to elect who governs their societies while governments from other countries are skeptical about the adoption. Undoubtedly, there were technical questions asked on the acceptance and rejection of e-voting systems. Therefore, the uses of e-voting systems in a few countries were reviewed and presented as follows.                                 .

The United States of America (USA) is a country of 50 states with a population of about 326 million. There were voting technologies and approaches adopted in the USA for voting. These technologies are Direct Recording Electronic (DRE), Optical Scan, and Hybrid Voting Machines.  In October 2016 the United States accused the government of Russia of cybersecurity interference in the US election. Politically, Russia was alleged to have “rigged” the US 2016 presidential election to favor a Republican nominee, Donald Trump by tampering with digital ballots.  According to the information made available, the US voters’ registration database needed to be highly protected from potentially fraudulent or abnormal activity. In addition, moved for the need to fully integrate biometric technology into the voting system in USA voting process. The US 2016 election had an issue of reliability in the entire process. Principally, reliability is one of the security requirements, thus there is no way security and functional requirements of the e-voting system could be compromised for personal gains. Furthermore, every e-voting system ought to satisfy the security and functional requirements for a credible election. With these controversies, basic security and functional requirements of e-voting needed to be satisfied for credible elections in the US.

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 India is the seventh-largest country by area, and the second-most populous country with over 1.3 billion people. In India, an Aadhaar card and fingerprint are major credentials for authentication.  There must be a match between already stored credentials and credentials presented on the day of the election before a voter could proceed to poll a vote for a particular contestant. This approach calls for a high cost of implementation as the production of biometric Aadhaar cards is economically expensive. Also, the transmission of sensitive results over the unprotected network was not protected against alteration. This implies that the results were disposed to interception and alteration. Here again, the voting system in India required attention and a novel approach that tackles election malpractices and security challenges. In India, Aadhaar cards are regularly presented to voters at no cost after successful enrolment. However, any correction after the enrolment attracts fees between RS50 and RS500 (i.e.  USD0.72 and USD7.19). This could negatively affect poor citizens to participate in an election thereby promoting a low turnout of voters and increasing the chances of unlawful results manipulations.

 Brazil officially known as the Federative Republic of Brazil is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. Brazil introduced electronic voting during the 1996 municipal elections. That year, voters in state capitals and cities with more than two hundred thousand voters used the first electronic polling stations. The electronic polling station used Advanced Encryption Technique (AET). However, presented a detailed and up-to-date security analysis of the voting software used in Brazilian elections. The finding revealed the most in-depth compromise of an official large-scale voting system ever performed.

Estonia, a country in Northern Europe, borders the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland. , Estonia was the first country in the world to introduce a nationwide Internet voting system. In the Estonian I-voting system, citizens that want to cast their vote would use National ID cards and mobile ID on web site for authentication. Estonian system general architecture All votes are recorded and provisionally stored on Vote Forwarding Server until the completion of the election. The resulting encrypted votes were then burned onto Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs). The DVDs are then transferred to the Vote Counting Server, an air-gapped machine that contains the election private key. The counting of votes was carried out by the counter server after successful decryption. The rigging is possible as encryption and decryption techniques raise suspicion of the sensitive results. Thus, a novel e-voting system is required.

The Republic of Namibia is a country in southern Africa whose western border is the Atlantic Ocean. In 2014, Namibia became the first African country to conduct a national election using electronic voting. The voting system used the voter’s fingerprint and Voter Verification Devices (VVD) for authentication as guided by the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN). Integration of the VVPAT feature in the e-voting system creates room for votes buying and selling by corrupt politicians and voters. Thus, the requirement of a vote’s confirmation (verifiability) is not suitable for a credible and fair election in most parts of the world.

FUTURE WORK

The researchers have commenced a strategy to develop a secured electronic voting system using fingerprint biometric and visual sema gram techniques that would tackle all the drawbacks presented in this paper and satisfy e-voting functional and security requirements towards achieving credible elections at all levels. I have elaborated in this paper, on the upcoming election in Pakistan. Read full article: https://www.complexworld.store/2023/03/electronic-voting-systems-in-different.html?m=1