Secure e-Voting in Smart Communities

Abstract

Nowadays, digital voting systems are growing in importance. This is an especially sensitive area, because elections can directly affect democratic life of many smart communities. The goal of digital voting systems is to exploit ICT technologies to improve the security and usability of traditional electoral systems. In this work we present a secure electronic voting system that guarantees the secrecy, anonymity, integrity, uniqueness and authenticity of votes, while offering a user-friendly experience to voters, putting them at ease through the use of technologies familiar to them. To ensure these fundamental security requirements, the system fully separates the registration and voting phases and does not collect information on users, making it impossible to determine the identity of whoever cast each vote. Only the electoral supervisor, during the tallying phase, can decipher the electronic ballot papers, which are also totally anonymous. We consider universities to be one of the most representative smart communities, and for this reason we used the case study of university elections held on our campus to test the system. The experiments carried out tested the system in increasingly challenging scenarios, and were carried out by volunteer students and university staff members.