A survey: electronic voting development and trends

Abstract

Any practitioner working on electronic voting (e-voting) seems to have different opinions on the main issues that seem to affect the area. On the one handgiven the criticality and the risk e-voting systems potentially pose to the democratic process-e-voting systems are permanently under a magnifying glass that amplifies any glitch, be it significant or not. On the other hand, given the interest e-voting raises within the general public, there seems to be a tendency to generalize and oversimplify. This tendency leads to attributing specific problems to all systems, regardless of context, situation, and actual systems used. Additionally, scarce know-how about the electoral context often contributes to make matters even more confused. This is not to say all e-voting systems show the security and reliability characteristics that are necessary for a system of such a criticality. On the contrary, a lot of work still has to be done. Starting from previous experiences and from a large-scale experiment we conducted in Italy, this paper provides some direction, issues, and trends in e-voting. Getting a clearer view of the research activities in the area, highlighting both positive and negative results, and emphasizing some trends could help, in our opinion, to draw a neater line between opinion and facts, and contribute to the construction of a next generation of e-voting machines to be safely and more confidently employed for elections.