IS 376: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY
Spring 2006
Paper Assignment #4: Idea Paper (100 points) – Online Voting System of the Future
Due: Tuesday, April 18, 2006
In January 2004, the Pentagon decided to drop a $22 million Internet voting pilot program
(known as SERVE) that would have allowed military personnel stationed all over the world to
vote in the November 2004 election. The decision is based on a report by a group of computer
experts, who concluded that the risk of the vote being hacked and ballots being tampered with
cannot be eliminated. At the same time, however, experiments with online voting during some
state primaries in the United States and in local elections in a limited number of other countries
during recent years seem to have worked flawlessly. For example, local elections in the Euro-
pean Union in the last two years allowing online voting went on without major disruptions de-
tected. In particular, the 2004 Michigan Democratic Party caucus in 2004 was pronounced a
glaring success, doubling voter participation over that in 2000 (without online voting).
Your assignment in this writing is to work out a proposal in order to promote Internet voting in
national elections in the United States. While the debate about online voting has been going on
for years, the issue has been tackled on a lot of fronts. Although some key issues still remain to
be solved, the general consensus is that online voting is the way to go in the future (but no one
knows exactly how far into the future). Sure, it makes sense to think that if e-commerce, e-
banking and e-tax filing can go smoothly, we can also make e-voting work.
You will focus your discussion on the following key areas in proposing the design of such a sys-
tem to alleviate prevalent security concerns. While you should not go into the nitty-gritty of the
technological aspects, it is helpful that you try to cover key technical issues in broad terms by
drawing ideas from issues/topics that have been covered in this course (especially the relevant
lectures given by Professor White in these areas).
These are the issues to cover in the paper:
1. Authentication. There must be a watertight electronic authentication system in place to
make sure -- 100% of the times -- that the person who casts the vote is the person authen-
ticated by the system. How will you achieve that in your proposed system?
2. Security. Security must be guaranteed: (1) during the voting, (2) in the process of trans-
ferring the vote from the voting machine to the server, and (3) while the vote is stored on
the server during the rest of the whole election. How will you make sure that no security
glitches can affect all these processes? How to prevent the system from hacking attacks
by global terrorists and rouge states?
3. Secrecy. A true democracy allows people to vote without fear. How do you make sure
that citizens’ voting information is kept anonymous so that no one else other than them-
selves will know how they voted?
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