1- Introduction

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• 1.1 Structure of the deliverable
• 1.2 Scope of this volume
• 1.3 Terminology

Report on electronic democracy projects, legal issues of Internet voting and users (i.e. voters and authorities representatives) requirements analysis

Synopsis

This document is the first volume of the report on electronic democracy projects, legal issues of Internet voting and users' (i.e., voters and authorities representatives) requirements analysis.

The purpose of this volume is to give an overview of a number of recent, interesting initiatives in electronic (online) voting.

File name

KUL-WP2-D4V1-v1.0.doc

Amendment History

Version	Date	Description
0.1	22 September 2000	First outline draft for comment
0.2	26 September 2000	Integration of consortium's comments
0.3	2 October 2000	Third outline draft and work share proposal for review
0.4	6 December 2000	First draft
0.5	8 January 2001	Second draft
0.6	24 January 2001	Third draft
0.7	16 March 2001	Fourth draft
0.8	29 March 2001	Fifth draft
1.0	31 May 2001	Final version sent to the EC

Disclaimer

The information in this document is provided as is and no guarantee or warranty is given that the information is fit for any particular purpose. The user thereof uses the information at its sole risk and liability.

Scope of CyberVote

CyberVote, an innovative cyber voting system for Internet terminals and mobile phones, is a research and development (RDT) programme being funded by the European Commission, with additional funding from the companies and organisations undertaking the work. It is part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) 1999 programme for research, technology development and demonstration under the fifth framework programme (5^th PCRD). It is attached to Key Action 1 "Systems and Services for the Citizens".

The objective of CyberVote is to demonstrate the first highly secure cyber-voting prototype using mobile and fixed Internet technologies. The project will define and implement a CyberVote prototype embedding an innovative voting protocol relying upon the use of advanced cryptographic tools that will be developed to ensure integrity, privacy and authentication of the voters. The prototype will be demonstrated and evaluated on 3 trial applications.

The project is carried out by a consortium led by MATRA Systèmes & Information (FR) and grouping together: British Telecommunications (UK), NOKIA Research Centre (FI), K.U.Leuven Research & Development (BE), Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (NL), Freie Hansestadt Bremen (DE), Mairie d'Issy-les-Moulineaux (FR) and Kista Stadsdelsnämnd (SE).

The project officially started on 1 September 2000. It will end on 1 March 2003. The overall budget of the project is 3 243 629 Euros and the total effort is 27.4 man-years.

Executive summary

This document is the first volume of the report on electronic democracy projects, legal issues of Internet voting and users' (i.e., voters and authorities representatives) requirements analysis.

The purpose of this volume is to give an overview of a number of recent, interesting initiatives in electronic (online) voting. Each initiative is briefly summarized by giving a system overview in a few lines, and mentioning some of the main architectural features and man-machine interface (MMI) aspects. If possible, special attention is devoted to legal issues (e.g., regarding the scope of the trials performed) and to security issues (e.g., how the security level achieved compares to CyberVote's goal of achieving so-called universally verifiable secret-ballot elections).

The report presents a background history on electronic voting. The actual descriptions of recent electronic voting initiatives are grouped together in two parts. The first part deals with 6 existing commercial solutions, 5 of which are American initiatives. For many of these commercial initiatives it is hard to get the necessary technical security details in order to fully judge the cryptographic merits of these systems. The second part deals with a number of recent project developments, all of which are European. For some of them (CHOOSE. InternetStem) technical details are available (and will be further studied in deliverable D6 volume 1), for the German initiative i-Vote technical details are scarce, and for the IST-projects E-Poll and Webocracy technical details are not yet available but will gradually become available as these projects progress.

The report concludes that the cryptographic strength of the CyberVote system will be much higher than of all of the other initiatives considered in this volume, except for the products by VoteHere.net and the prototype used in the InternetStem project, which target the same set of security properties as the CyberVote project. In addition it is concluded that the CyberVote project aims at extending the platform for voting clients from PCs to other networked devices such as mobile phones and possibly TV settop boxes, whereas the other projects considered in this deliverable only target PCs. Finally, the CyberVote project is to take legal issues for binding, public elections into account, as further detailed in volume 2 of this deliverable.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 Introduction *

1.1 Structure of the deliverable *

1.2 Scope of this volume *

1.3 Terminology *

2 The History of electronic voting *

2.1 Background *

2.2 The concept of online voting *

2.3 Offline electronic voting *

2.4 The early online systems *

2.5 Voting with the Minitel *

2.6 Televote systems *

2.7 Examples of Internet voting elections progress since 1995 *

3 Online Voting Systems *

3.1 Commercial solutions for online voting systems *
3.1.1 Introduction *
3.1.2 election.com (USA) *
3.1.3 Safevote.com (USA) *
3.1.4 Trueballot.com (USA) *
3.1.5 Validity Systems (USA) *
3.1.6 Votehere.net (USA) *
3.1.7 Votia.com (Sweden) *
3.1.8 Summary *

3.2 Project developments for online voting systems *
3.2.1 CHOOSE (Netherlands) *
3.2.2 E-POLL (Italy) *
3.2.3 InternetStem (Netherlands) *
3.2.4 Isoco (Spain) *
3.2.5 i-Vote (Germany) *
3.2.6 Webocracy (Slovak Republic) *
3.2.7 Summary *

4 Conclusion *

5 References *

6 Abbreviations and acronyms *

7 Points of Contact for further information *

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Planning of the E-Poll project *
Figure 2: Overview of the E-poll system *
Figure 3: Overview of the InternetStem system *
Figure 4: InterStem GUI *

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: General information on commercial solutions *
Table 2: Technical information on commercial solutions *
Table 3: Client platforms used in InterStem *
Table 4: General information on project developments *
Table 5: Technical information on project developments *

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Structure of the deliverable

Deliverable D4 reports on electronic democracy projects, legal issues of Internet voting, and user requirement analysis. It consists of 3 separate volumes:

· Volume 1: report on electronic democracy projects,

· Volume 2: report on legal issues of Internet voting,

· Volume 3: report on the users (i.e., voters and authorities representatives) requirements analysis.

The present document is volume 1 of this deliverable. It is input to deliverable D6 `Report on the review and selection of authentication and security techniques, applicable Internet technologies, hardware platforms, mobile phones and Internet terminals', and more in particular to D6 volume 1 `Report on the review and selection of authentication and security techniques' [13] and D6 volume 2 `Report on applicable Internet technologies' [14].

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1.2 Scope of this volume

This deliverable gives an overview of a number of recent, interesting initiatives in electronic (online) voting. The overview of initiatives is not intended to be exhaustive. In any case, the overview is restricted to election systems that intend to achieve a certain non-trivial level of security (plus some older systems considered in the next section), and hence may possibly influence current and future developments in Internet-based voting systems for public, binding elections. Part of the problem in the development of these Internet-based voting systems lies in the fact that the standards and requirements for these systems must still be set. Therefore, next to security and privacy issues, some of the legal issues are also considered (but see Volume 2 of this deliverable for more details on legal issues).

Each initiative is briefly summarized by giving a system overview in a few lines, and mentioning some of the main architectural features and man-machine interface (MMI) aspects. If possible, special attention is devoted to legal issues (e.g., regarding the scope of the trials performed) and to security issues (e.g., how the security level achieved compares to CyberVote's goal of achieving so-called universally verifiable secret-ballot elections).

It should be remarked that this review is the result of a study that has been carried out at a certain moment in time. Given the rapid changes in both technology and economy, some of the systems described in this report are likely to undergo changes. The reader is therefore invited to check the description of these systems by referring to the URLs given in the reference chapter.

This volume is organized as follows. First an overview of the history of electronic voting is given. Next the descriptions of recent initiatives in electronic voting is given. These initiatives are divided in two groups: a first group with existing commercial online voting solutions, and a second group with recent projects developments in the area of online voting. The report concludes with a comparison of the goals of CyberVote with the initiatives considered in this deliverable.

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1.3 Terminology

In this section we introduce some terminology for notions related to elections and electronic voting systems.

Elections may be organised in many different ways. Paper-based elections make use of paper ballots, while automated elections make use of some kind of voting machines that automate the voting and/or tabulation procedures. When the voting machines are actually implemented by computers, we talk about electronic voting.

Electronic voting systems may be further divided into offline and online voting systems. In offline voting systems the computers used may in essence be viewed as a single computer. In online voting systems the computers used are connected by a (closed or open) network, resulting in an essential distinction between clients and servers.

Electronic Democracy (or e-Democracy) systems, which may in turn be viewed as parts of e-Government systems, form a broad class of systems related to public services targeted at informing citizens on political issues. Such systems may also cater for online discussions between citizens, possibly involving politicians too. These systems may also include mechanisms for online polls, which may be used for conducting informal surveys, without seeking a high level of accuracy of the result. Online voting systems are much more formal than online polling systems, because they seek (or should seek) to accurately reflect the voters' preferences.

The present report focuses on online (electronic) voting systems. If the network used is the Internet, this fact may be emphasised by using the term Internet voting instead.

The class of online voting systems may be further divided by considering which parts of the system are used in combination with the network. An important aspect is whether the votes need to be cast at a polling station, (polling-place online voting) or may be cast from a remote location, being a PC in a public place, at home, at work, or a mobile phone, etc. (remote online voting).

In case of polling-place online voting, one may further consider whether voters need to go to a predetermined polling station, or whether they are free to go to any polling station; in the latter case an online database is required to keep track of who voted or not. Similarly, one may consider whether the votes are collected and tabulated at the polling station, or whether votes are collected at a remote server.

Finally, we distinguish between public elections and private elections.

Public elections are (general) elections for citizens' representatives in local, regional, national or supranational legislative bodies. As analyzed in Volume 2 of this deliverable (Legal issues of Internet voting), public elections are subject to particular (national) laws and rules concerning e.g. ballot secrecy, fairness, verifiability, accuracy, democracy, etc.

Private elections are defined as non-public elections. These are not subject to such firm legal requirements as public elections. Examples are elections within unions, organizations or companies, and proxy-voting for shareholders. In private elections the election officials usually have more freedom in setting the rules for the election procedures than in public elections.

 

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