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Crafting a literature review on the topic of E-Voting Systems can be a challenging endeavor.

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The vast majority of those who voted online would have voted anyway. About 800 million people
voted in India’s 2014 national elections, and over 115 million in Brazil’s 2004 local elections. There
are two methods used to tally votes using an OMR system. Thus, from a vote cast, it should be
impossible to identify the voter. These reported cases were detected, but it is only reasonable to
assume that were other undetected errors, and we will never know how many. A malicious voting
system created and distributed by one vendor to hundreds of thousands of polling booths, can
systematically falsify millions of votes. Some systems produced print-outs with bar codes or QR-
codes instead of a traditional paper ballot. Many voting machines can transmit results to central
counting systems, for example via the Internet, telephone, mobile phone or satellite connection.
Internet voting (I-voting) is defined as systems where obtaining ballots, casting votes or counting
votes in political elections and referendums uses an internet connection. E-voting therefore appears a
much more appealing option. To fully understand an e-voting system’s behaviour, the compilers
which are used to translate the human-readable source codes into machine-readable code, the voting
system’s hardware and the operating system need to be analysed as well. Alex Halderman, Professor
of Computer Science, University of Michigan, US, managed to get hold of an Indian EVM
unofficially and published a paper titled “Security Analysis of India’s Electronic Voting Machines”.
It also identifies internal data stores of Login, Confirmation, Polling Result, Citizen, Candidate that
must be present in order for the E-Voting system to do its job, and shows the flow of data between
the various parts of Voting, Candidate, Confirmation, Login, Polling Result of the system. Central
scanners, which are used to count absentee ballots and paper ballots from polling places that lack
precinct-based scanners, are also vulnerable. The system guards against changes to the voter’s ballot
and uses a mix-net decryption procedure to ensure that each vote is accurately counted. The question
is what drives governments to initiate the adoption of a system that arguably is not better than the
one it replaces. Over time, research has highlighted specific problems, such as the need for further
work on blockchain-based electronic voting and that blockchain-based electronic voting schemes
have significant technical challenges. 9.1. Scalability and Processing Overheads For a small number
of users, blockchain works well. This is impossible as there is no prior way in which the order of the
candidate can be known besides the location where the EVMs will be used. Protecting such
information is a very major part of information security. If the electronic record is inaccurate, then
the printed report will also be inaccurate. Other electronic voting systems include punch card
systems, optical scan voting systems, electronic ballot printers and Internet voting. Although to store
data on remote servers is assumed to be safe, this does not provide security against hackers’ attacks,
this may cause data loss or damage in the event of poor system security administration. The problems
with Votomatic ballots were severe enough that, by the early 1970s, IBM abandoned the technology,
and in 1988, the National Bureau of Standards published a report by Saltman recommending the
immediate abandonment of this technology. Available online: (accessed on 28 July 2020). Prashar,
D.; Jha, N.; Jha, S.; Joshi, G.; Seo, C. Integrating IOT and blockchain for ensuring road safety: An
unconventional approach. These authorities ensure that only registered voters can vote and they vote
only once on the election day. However, Internet voting from unsupervised locations requires voting
systems to place a greater emphasis on voter authentication to avoid impersonation, and also elicits
concerns about the secrecy of the ballot. There is a fundamental conflict between verification and
keeping votes anonymous. Many experts think that DLT offers the four most prominent features
every electoral system requires: Security, Transparency, Accessibility, and Auditability. They have
used the Multichain framework, a private blockchain derived from Bitcoin, which is unsuitable for
the nationwide voting process. Hard to track who voted and who didn’t Online Voting System
Instant Poll result Easy to keep track of voters.
The main goal of this analysis was to examine the current status of blockchain-based voting research
and online voting systems and any related difficulties to predict future developments. It not only
enables the voter to make his or her ballot choices, but also records them directly on the machine and
produces results on the machine at the end of the voting process. Tamper-resistant and anonymous
validations are active areas of research and there are some practical ideas that could address them,
but issues of trust still remain. There is the danger that potential attackers, operating in collusion with
dishonest insiders, will ensure that the VVPATs sent to those polling stations which have the rigged
EVMs do not work properly so that the VVPAT slips of these EVMs are not taken up for hand
counting, thereby defeating the very purpose of introducing VVPAT. Just before running the
election, the hash is recomputed. After the voting process has been over, the results are sent to the
base station for various analyses and declaring the verdict. An RLA manually checks a sample of
ballots, or voter-verifiable paper records, until there is sufficient evidence that the reported outcome
is correct. In case of pre-2006 (M1) and post-2006 EVMs (M2), 4 Balloting Units can be cascaded
together to accommodate up to a maximum of 64 candidates (including NOTA), which can be used
with one Control Unit. Non-malicious equipment malfunction can cause flipping of votes, loss of
votes, wrong totaling similar to EVM tampering. The instance of class objects involved in this UML
Sequence Diagram of E-Voting Management System are as follows. In this review, articles were
eligible for inclusion if they were published in English, in a peer-reviewed journal and their focus
was blockchain-based e-voting systems. Conference proceedings on blockchain-based e-voting were
also examined. All share a strong vision for the blockchain network to put transparency into practice.
Since India is currently the second largest population in the world and therefore by default becomes
the largest national population to vote in a democratic process, any use of electronic voting machines
on a pan Indian scale would make it the largest instance of electronic voting. However, each
transparency is encrypted with a form of visual cryptography so that it alone does not reveal any
information unless it is decrypted. Among other things, these differences can be attributed to
differences in what is included in the unit cost as well as differences in the characteristics of the
equipment. The FBI’s Cyber Division issued an alert stating foreign hackers had infiltrated state
election systems, though their bulletin did not specifically mention the incidents in Arizona and
Illinois. For example, a denial of service attack in 2015 caused Canadian government websites to be
inaccessible for several hours. If their goal is to disrupt an election or undermine confidence in its
outcome, they may need only to achieve DoS against e-pollbooks or leave behind traces of
interference like malicious software or evidence of tampering with voter registration lists or other
records. About 53% of attacks on organization have been deliberate actions or negligence by staff.
54% of IT staff feel it is difficult to detect insider threats while 33% of organization have no formal
response plan (Cole, 2014). These systems are mainly an electronic interface to generate paper votes,
which may then be counted more efficiently. Due to certification requirements and the length of time
required for certification, however, such errors are likely to remain uncorrected. (Certification can
take a year or more.). After a Florida recount the vote was: Bush: 2,912,790. With this kind of
cryptography, it is possible to have all the benefits offered by PKC, without neither the need of
certificates nor all the core components of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). As was already
mentioned, the blockchain itself is the name for the data structure. This is not very practical, though,
as the attacker will want to modify as many votes as possible in order to maximize his influence in
the outcome of the elections. Electronic evidence can be altered by compromised or faulty hardware
or software. This lack of transparency means that state officials who buy voting machines seldom
know about problems that occurred with machines during testing. Source code is never handed over
to anyone outside the software group of PSUs. This presents a challenge due to the necessity of
preserving the secrecy of the ballot. Even when they buy from the same vendor, they run things
differently.
Systems which use them exclusively are called DRE voting systems. When electronic ballots are used
there is no risk of exhausting the supply of ballots. Institutional Review Board Statement Not
applicable. Journal of Cardiovascular Development and Disease (JCDD). However, building upon
cryptographic methods initially developed by computer scientist and cryptographer David Lee
Chaum, researchers have developed an approach called end-to-end (E2E) verifiability. Also, I’ve
shared your web site in my social networks. This is false —the U.S. voting system wasn’t hacked. In
the US and Western Europe, more states have been opting out of electronic voting systems and
returning to paper out of worries over the number of glitches, and the inability to verify that
electronic votes or the software on machines have not been manipulated. There is no such thing as a
perfect electronic voting system and available systems continue to evolve with ongoing technological
advances. Punchcards were used first in the 1964 Presidential election. Tampering an EVM through
the hardware port or through a Wi-Fi connection is not possible as there is no frequency receiver or
wireless decoder in the EVM machine. VVPAT is the form of Independent Verification most
commonly found in elections in the United States and other countries such as Venezuela and India.
As troubling, voting machines themselves can be compromised within seven minutes of direct access,
with little more than a screwdriver and a new ROM chip. In Ethereum, a smart contract is a piece of
code deployed to the network so that everyone has access to it. Thereafter, this printed slip
automatically gets cut and falls in sealed drop box of the VVPAT. Election officials, observers, or
even cameras would address security and privacy concerns, and prevent coercion or other forms of
intervention. They must also afford voters the possibility to review and amend their vote before
confirmation of their choice. Available online: (accessed on 8 January 2020). Kuenzi, R. These are
the Arguments that Sank E-Voting in Switzerland. It can be used for any type of election like local
government, national government, corporate board, unions, etc. The RSA keys cannot be extracted
and in order to be able to use the card for signatures or encryption, the voter must first enter a pin.
To sum-up, elections can only be free and fair when there is a broad belief in the legitimacy of the
power held by those in positions of authority. Homomorphic encryption can be used to obtain various
properties necessary in an online voting system; with regards to privacy, it is used so that only the
sum of all the choices is decrypted, and never each voter’s choice by itself. All jurisdictions now
provide accessible equipment for voters with disabilities. Both OMR and OCR are applied in
electronic voting system. This is why indirect proofs of the validity of the electronic results, such as
paper trails or system certification, in combination with stringent quality control and security
procedures, are exceptionally important. When an elector is given a ballot paper, their number is
noted down on the counterfoil of the ballot paper (which also carries the ballot paper number).
Additional research will be required in order to draw stronger conclusions on how internet voting
changes voter participation. They have access because they’re supposed to have access. Let us
assume that someone has designed a special kind of electronic circuit, technically called a transceiver,
which is ultra-small and is artificially inserted in an EVM, so that it gets hooked to its control unit.
Venkatapur et al. proposed a blockchain based voting system based on Aadhar Verification. The
instance of class objects involved in this UML Sequence Diagram of E-Voting Management System
are as follows.
Of all those democratic countries, only about 25 have experimented with or used electronic voting to
elect their governments. Participants with little prior knowledge and only limited tools and resources
showed that they could undermine the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of these systems.
Moreover, a closer physical examination of the machines highlighted several supply chain
vulnerabilities. The election process must be reasonably understandable for the public. Illegal votes
and repetition of votes is checked for in this system. Despite these benefits, online voting solutions
are viewed with a great deal of caution because they introduce new threats. Applied to voting, once
a voting transaction was added to the blockchain and confirmed it would be difficult to modify or
delete voting records (Bracamonte, Yamasaki and Okada, 2016). The random data is stored on the
client machine for some time, as it is required for vote verification. Electronic voting in controlled
environments happens when the casting of votes takes place in polling stations, polling kiosks or
other locations under the supervision of staff appointed by the electoral management body (EMB).
Aim The main concept of this project to build a website,which should be able to allow people to cast
their vote online. Many countries are currently considering introducing e-voting systems with the aim
of improving various aspects of the electoral process. However, design of voting systems should take
these threats into account and leverage on technical security wherever possible to ensure that any
deliberate attempt to circumvent the technology is detected. Observers should consider the
provisions in place to protect the right of these voters to cast ballots, including ballot design (e.g., in
minority languages) or availability of ballots in larger type sizes, the availability of electronic voting
machines for disabled voters, and any provisions to ensure that illiterate or disabled voters are able
to cast and verify their votes. Once it is done voter is accessed to candidate list through which vote
can be given for their preferred candidate. One of the significant benefits of this new system is the
possibility for increased efficiency. Central scanners, which are used to count absentee ballots and
paper ballots from polling places that lack precinct-based scanners, are also vulnerable. With E2E-V
systems—as with any voting system—a bad actor could simply claim that his or her vote was not
accurately captured. Standard electronic voting and blockchain-based electronic voting apply to
categorically distinct organizational ideas. 7. Current Blockchain-Based Electronic Voting Systems
The following businesses and organizations, founded but mainly formed over the last five years, are
developing the voting sector. In doing so, the implementation of e-voting reduces the risk of
widespread fraud and manipulation at polling station level, but concentrates the risk of manipulation
at the central level. Until now, procedures for tracking and securing certified software have been
extremely poor, so no one could ensure that the software tested was the same, unaltered, software
used in elections. Experts have long recommended that all elections should be audited before the
winner is certified to ensure the results are correct. Without voter-verified paper records that
accurately reflect the voters’ choices, it is simply impossible to perform a meaningful recount. If
results are printed the printouts can be used as physical evidence of the results produced by the
voting machine, and copies can be distributed to stakeholders present at the polling station and can
also be posted for public display. They are completely unsecured and the data inside EEPROMs can
be manipulated from an external source. This voting system is designed by integrating embedded
system with mobile infrastructure. The three main types of DRE voting machines use touchscreens,
push-buttons, and dials to register votes. As long as the virus is active on the computer, it can copy
itself to other files or disks when they are used (Technology Corner, 1999). But because of the
limitation of incomplete laws and regulations. Simply stated, there is no way to optimize internet
voting. Finally, transparency in Internet voting systems may be compromised to an even greater
extent than with DREs. The voting status remains unconfirmed until a miner updates the main ledger.
This will allow public understanding and trust to develop in the new system, and provide time to
deal with problems and resistance. These samples are assembled into the EVM, evaluated and
verified for functionality at great length. In the old system, paper ballots from different ballot boxes
were mixed together, thoroughly shuffled and packed into bundles of 50 ballots each, and then
counted. This requires that electronic voting systems create an audit trail which is verifiable. If the
voter must use a bar-code scanner or other electronic device to verify, then the record is not truly
voter-verifiable, since it is actually the electronic device that is verifying the record for the voter. That
vendor could then unwittingly distribute that malicious code to thousands of machines across the
nation and alter the election results in every state where those machines are used. This means that no
special machines are required to vote on the ballot, it means that, with proper ballot design, a voter
can easily verify that the markings on the ballot exactly convey his or her intent, and it means that,
during a hand recount, no special expertise is required to interpret the intent of the voters. Moreover
blind voters have also been taking into consideration and the machines are made braille compatible.
Also, the “tamper” log in the system only monitors activity generated from the Diebold software, so
such vulnerabilities such as changing the password via Access remain undetectable with the current
design. In a total of 232 cases (2% of votes), voters had logged in, selected their vote but not
confirmed it, and left the booth; the votes were not recorded. As former Central Intelligence Agency
and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden observed that these efforts represented part
of a sustained campaign to discredit Western countries and institutions and specifically “Western
democratic processes and the American election.” The Russian campaign represents an unsettling
development that adds greatly to the technical and operational challenges facing election
administrators. This testing should take place transparently and with access for electoral competitors
and observers. About 800 million people voted in India’s 2014 national elections, and over 115
million in Brazil’s 2004 local elections. Election officials, observers, or even cameras would address
security and privacy concerns, and prevent coercion or other forms of intervention. This voting
system is designed by integrating embedded system with mobile infrastructure. These actors often
possess more sophisticated capabilities and can apply greater resources to the conduct of such
operations. With DRE, there is no paper trail, no verification, and thus no scrutiny of the processes.
VVPAT consists of a Printer and a VVPAT Status Display Unit (VSDU). This ensures that the
software has really been written as per the requirements laid down for its intended use only.
Nihfw.(1987). Management training modules for voting officers. Abuja. It has been recorded that of
the last 5 US presidential elections, the average number of voters was little over 46%. The DRE
retains an electronic copy of the other layer and gives the physical copy as a receipt to allow the
voter to confirm that the electronic ballot was not later changed. The will of the people shall be the
basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections
which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free
voting procedures.”. The purpose of this section is to highlight on the implementation. Additionally,
costs for transportation, printing and maintenance must be considered. TTi limited (formerly Adorbel
ltd.) a consultant responsible for the field. The Internet is not currently a suitable medium for
electronic voting. When E2E-verifiability is used with paper ballots, conventional recounts and risk-
limiting audits are possible as additional means of verification. International Association for
Cryptologic Research 2018. CU accepts only specially encrypted and dynamically coded data from
BU.
But the problem with that is by using advanced security and cryptographic tools, most people can’t
understand the process. The countries that have used electronic voting include small nations like
Estonia to the oldest democracy, the United States of America. There are many ways to tamper with
a machine, as malware may be introduced at any point from manufacturing to the moment the votes
are being counted. These potential divides could be problematic for participation and representation.
Although Brazil’s e-voting election in 2000 was considered a success, issues of the lack of public
trust and confidence in the system have been raised. The use of blockchain in the distribution of
databases in e-voting systems has shown that it can assist in solving the problem of database
manipulation. This possibility requires the establishment of specific technical and procedural security
measures to guarantee that these two sets of information cannot be linked under any circumstances.
While HAVA includes a requirement that all voting systems must provide a manual audit capacity, its
definition of that requirement is ambiguous, and there are conflicting interpretations of its meaning.
Secure voting requires that these operations be performed verifiably, not that they be performed in a
decentralized manner. Kiosk Voting Machines could be located in convenient locations such as
malls, libraries and schools. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger and R3 Corda are the most renowned
blockchain frameworks. In the second generation, GSM (global system for mobile communications)
is very famous technology. Once for allocation of machines to assembly constituencies and second to
polling stations in the presence of candidates’, this means no one really knows which machine would
go to what location and hence pre-programming can be ruled out as a way of tampering. Moreover,
they may have other goals than shifting the outcome for a particular candidate. That study prompted
the Ohio Secretary of State to delay the installation of DRE voting machines in that state until after
the 2004 election. Even the final placement of the list of candidates on the balloting unit is not
known till the last day of withdrawal of nomination before elections, so tampering with machines is
virtually an impossible task. A Systematic Review of Challenges and Opportunities of Blockchain for
E-Voting. The voter’s votes are incorrectly tallied and the printed ballot image is incorrect, but this
error goes undetected because the voter is not there to view the printed version. Consequently, it is
not possible for experts not associated with the companies to determine how vulnerable the code is
to tampering. ECI-EVMs cannot be physically tampered with nor their components be changed
without anyone noticing. However, there are flaws in the specified procedures, that are discussed
below. In one scenario, voters might be allowed to “spoil” one or more ballots after receipts have
been produced. This study showed that blockchain systems brought issues that needed more
attention and there are still many technical problems. That is why it is important to know that
blockchain-based technology is still at an early stage in an e-voting solution. This will increase the
voting percentage in India and reduces the cost of contributing the elections. By integrating an
electronic voting scheme with the GSM infrastructure. Often EVMs are stored for extended periods
in facilities that lack climate control. This confidence depends on two conditions: (1) that election
administrators follow appropriate procedures to maintain the chain-of-custody and secure physical
ballots—from the time ballots are received, either in-person or by mail, until auditing is complete;
and (2) that the personnel conducting the audit are following appropriate auditing procedures and the
equipment and software used to audit the election are independent of the equipment and software
used to produce the initial tallies. These systems maybe connected with virtual private networks
(VPN) using secure socket layer (SSL) for security, votes automatically counted and verified at a
central Facility (Langa, 2000). When an elector is given a ballot paper, their number is noted down on
the counterfoil of the ballot paper (which also carries the ballot paper number). Of course, but it is
very difficult because they are kept guarded.
Further, the certification process should be conducted in a transparent manner providing electoral
stakeholders access to information on the process and earning public confidence. Technical
Evaluation Committee in 2006 has concluded that any tampering of CU by coded signals by wireless
or outside or Bluetooth or WiFi is ruled out as CU does not have high frequency receiver and data
decoder. Thus, a single machine is used for composition, casting, and recording of votes. Voting
machines provide easy access to cast the vote by using mobile phone. The ultimate goal of electoral
reform by implementing an electronic voting solution—is a credible electoral process that enjoys a
high level of public trust and confidence in the new system. Besides keeping log records of all
operations performed by the administrator, it is also crucial to store election results safely. It does not
happen as it takes immense computational resources to erase the blockchain network. 3. How
Blockchain Can Transform the Electronic Voting System Blockchain technology fixed shortcomings
in today’s method in elections made the polling mechanism clear and accessible, stopped illegal
voting, strengthened the data protection, and checked the outcome of the polling. Adopting an open
standards policy by making the software public and allowing parties to test the software installed in
the EVMs would have offered better protection. If discrepancies are discovered the audit can be
escalated to a full hand count and the hand count of the paper ballots becomes the official result.
Blockchain technologies require a more sophisticated software architecture as well as managerial
expertise. It can also involve transmission of ballots and votes via telephones, private computer
networks, or the Internet. If not carefully planned and designed, the introduction of e-voting can
undermine confidence in the whole electoral process. Reviled specific security problems are identity
theft, malware on the voter’s computer or device trojan horses, spyware, viruses, worms), server
penetration attacks, spoofing, fake web pages, DNS (Domain Name Server) attack and DDoS
(Distributed Denial of Service) attack. When the votes are counted, the result is a complete surprise
to almost everyone. However, other usage and applications have emerged in the last few years. The
security features include authentication based on Public Key Cryptography (PKC), laser marked
unique serial numbers, tamper resistant and tamper detection features. Traditional Paper Voting
Systems in Brazil, a 2018 study. However, even this approach may be subject to attack via the
internet, especially if encryption and verification are not sufficient. There has been contention,
especially in the United States, that electronic voting, especially DRE voting, could facilitate
electoral fraud and may not be fully auditable. The ITAs are private, for-profit labs that receive
money from voting vendors to test their systems, giving the vendors control over such parts of the
testing process as who gets to view the test results. The most common solution to this for in-person
electronic voting machines is through the production of a VVPAT, and this solution is emerging as a
standard in this regard. In the particular case of Internet voting, blockchain methods do not redress
the security issues associated with Internet voting. Most security professionals believe that an insider
attack at the software development stage could make it to the final product without being detected
(although there is disagreement about the likelihood of such an attack). The vendor acknowledged
responsibility for the loss. Even though the initial investment was heavy, it has since been expected to
save costs of production and printing of millions of ballot papers, their transportation and storage,
substantial reduction in the counting staff and the remuneration paid to them. Let us assume that
someone has designed a special kind of electronic circuit, technically called a transceiver, which is
ultra-small and is artificially inserted in an EVM, so that it gets hooked to its control unit. Citizens
that want to cast their vote use their web browser to connect to a government website and download
a program. Instead of resolving the issue in order to be able to burn the votes to DVD according to
protocol, a staff member decided to use his personal USB flash drive in order to transfer the votes to
the counting server. The new Voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) system could also be
interfaced with the ASIC based design. When voters cast their ballots, they must be able to verify
that their choices have been accurately and permanently recorded on that ballot.

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