Implementation Issues in Secure E-voting Schemes

As cheating is an inherent threat to voting, it is essential that an e-voting system provides a high level of security. At the moment, commercially available e-voting solutions mainly advertise their convenience, efficiency and low cost. On the other hand, cryptographically secure voting schemes in the literature are generally considered to be complex and inefficient for a real-world implementation. This paper examines implementation issues of cryptographically secure secret-ballot voting schemes. A survey of different schemes and various implementations is provided. The possibilities of hardware implementations for various cryptographic primitives are discussed. The paper provides a foundation in designing secure and practical e-voting schemes to produce a secure, efficient and publicly acceptable implementation of voting schemes in the real world.