The Security Paradox, Disclosing Source Code to Attain Secure Electronic Elections

In recent years we have witnessed the amalgamation of government services and electronic systems. Citizens and state interactions have changed focus towards human centered electronic approaches, introducing citizens with electronic services that have simplified bureaucratic mechanisms and reduced response time. All efforts of implementing electronic governance have led to the next step in this process, digitalization of the decision making process, electronic voting. Electronic voting is an evolutionary step in the integration of electronic governments which will inevitably be introduced by all democracies across borders. This paper will view the opportunity of introducing electronic voting and explore the characteristics of such a system to provide a secure and trustworthy platform. Setting the field and clarifying disambiguation will result in viewing the critical issues involved in such a system. Transparency and audit ability may be one of the most decisive rudiments of such a system as it is directed in increasing citizen’s confidentiality ,focal point of this research is the selection involving the “disclosability” of e-voting system source code. Approaching the issue from information’s systems security perspective and taking into account relations with the open source initiative, it is evaluated that for electronic voting to harness the power of scientific review and secure coding, security must not depend on obscurity.