Functional Requirements for a Secure Electronic Voting System

Electronic voting has been attracting the attention of governments and research groups with most work on the subject referring to the user requirements such a system should satisfy. For several cases, though, requirement identification seldom goes further than a simple narrative description of a basic set of nonfunctional characteristics related to security. On the other hand, governmental reports usually refer to requirements as the set of applicable laws pertaining a certain voting procedure. Both sides seem to underestimate the fact that an electronic voting system is an information system with functional, as well as non-functional, requirements. In this paper we apply the Rational Software Development Process for identifying and presenting the requirements an electronic voting system should meet. The requirements are based on a generic voting model that has been developed having in mind the European Union member states legislation, the organisational details of currently applicable voting procedures and the opportunities offered and the constraints imposed by the state-of-the-art technology.