Development of audit and data protection principles in electronic voting systems

• Main Authors: Yuriy Khlaponin, Volodymyr Vyshniakov, Viktoriia Ternavska, Oleksandr Selyukov, Oleg Komarnytskyi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: PC Technology Center 2021-08-01
• Series: Eastern-European Journal of Enterprise Technologies
• Subjects: audit of online voting system; data protection; exclusion of illegal influence on voters
• Online Access: http://journals.uran.ua/eejet/article/view/238259

It is assumed in standard information protection technologies that there are owners of this information who put forward requirements for protection. In secret voting systems, the information belongs to the community of citizens, and to protect it, vote organizers must create conditions that allow each voter to make sure that the vote secrecy and accuracy of vote counting are preserved. In developed democracies, this issue is resolved through a widely available audit of all procedures that may be mistrusted. Any voter can conduct such an audit. The anxiety of citizens of democratic countries is based on the idea that if electronic voting is introduced, it will be impossible to conduct such an audit. The article proposes principles of auditing all those software and hardware tools and processes of the online voting system that can generate voter distrust. This audit is carried out using a dedicated server open to voters and their fiduciaries. This server provides continuous monitoring of actions of the service staff in terms of possible interference in the operation of the voting system. Also, due to this server, auditors receive data on the integrity of the voting system hardware and software including its audit tools and an alarm signal in the event of a threat. It was possible to reduce the average time of processing the voter requests to two seconds. This means that processing a maximum of 2,500 voter requests at a vote station will take no more than two hours. Simultaneous access of 50 voters to the server will not make them wait in the queue for more than 2 minutes. Implementation results were described and links were given for conducting experimental voting on the Internet.