Electronic Voting: An All-Purpose Platform

It is generally considered that a key component of electronic government in the future will be electronic voting, as a means of facilitating the participation of citizens in elections and public debates. However, a long path has to be pursued before electronic voting, particularly if based on Internet, is accepted as a reliable system alternative to conventional methods. In this paper, we propose a new and simple platform, based on open software, which can be used primarily in small to medium sized communities, as a means to build confidence and experience for future larger elections. We try to provide adequate answers to multiple requirements, such as accuracy, democracy, privacy, verifiability and mobility. This can be done by establishing a distributed system which supports the different roles of a voting system and by using cryptography techniques in the interactions between these components.