Maintaining democratic values in e-voting with eVACS®

Abstract

The principles of equality, secrecy, security and transparency apply to any democratic election system irrespective of whether paper ballots, mechanical or electronic means are used to conduct the election. All these principles were mandated as requirements, designed into, and successfully operated as features of, eVACS®, the electronic voting and counting system used since 2001 by the Australian Capital Territory Electoral Commission. How eVACS® achieves these requirements is described in this paper, with particular emphasis being given to security and transparency and the approaches adopted to ensure verifiability via electronic audit trails.