Verifiable Electronic Voting System: An Open Source Solution

Elections, referenda and polls are vital processes for the operation of a modern democracy. They form the mechanism for transferring power from citizens to their representatives. Although some commentators claim that the pencil-and-paper systems used in countries such as Canada and UK are still the best method of avoiding vote rigging, recent election problems, and the need for faster, better, cheaper vote counting, have stimulated great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. While computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the possible perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming increased security and reliability. Many democracies have adopted electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is rising. Although the electronic voting process has gained popularity and users, it is a great challenge to provide a reliable system. The existing systems available to perform the election tasks are far from trustworthy. In this paper we describe VEV (Verifiable E-Voting), an electronic voting system which is opne, but also provides for secret and secure voting, and can be used and verified over existing network system.