A Review of Electronic Voting Systems: Strategy for a Novel

Published Online February 2020 in MECS

Voting is a process that involves citizen or a group of people in an institution to collectively make a choice on a particular contestant among listed contestants based on rules and regulations. Voting is an expression of choice through ballot. A contestant is usually declared winner in an election having scored the required number of ballots or votes and fulfilled the specified conditions that govern the declaration of winner.

For many years in the world, the paper-based voting system has been used as a method to vote during elections. This approach is stressful as voters need to line up to register for election before they are permitted to vote [1]. In a large population, the paper-based voting system requires days to conduct an election and announce the final results. Reference [2] reported that the paperbased system allows a voter to register and vote more than the acceptable requirement of one voter, one vote. Many bad politicians use this opportunity to engage the voters to poll votes in multiple times. The problem of multiple votes by a voter has resulted in unwanted candidate been emerged as the winner.

The paper-based voting system allows the alteration of the election results. The manual counting of votes polled by the voters can be easily manipulated to favour a particular candidate. At present, after manual collation, the results of the election are being scanned and transmitted through an unprotected network using mobile phones, i-pads and tablets. This procedure is not reliable and can be made to favour a particular candidate. In many existing voting systems, the votes polled by the voters has not been verified by the voters. This makes the voters doubt the integrity of the election system. In addition, few people have been involving in the voting system which makes the alteration easier.

Elections being a fundamental pillar of leadership selection in any democracy, has an indisputably characterized with challenges such as ballot padding, candidate imposition, fighting, voters’ impersonation, multiple voting by false voters, snatching of the electoral materials such as ballot boxes, ballot papers by unauthorized group of people, massive rigging by party agents in collaboration with the elections’ officials, insecurity of votes, poor funding, bad attitudes of the political class and inability to prosecute election offenders. It is very obvious that traditional methods of voting using papers, ballot boxes and manual counting of votes have provided rooms for the corrupt politicians to alter election results; this, in turn, makes the populace to lose confidence in the integrity of the election across the globe [3]. Electronic voting (e-voting) was basically introduced to solve the problems identified in traditional voting systems. E-voting systems involved integration of electronic devices into voting system. However, various challenges had been identified with e-voting systems. Attackers or fraudsters in collaboration with corrupt politicians and election officers had been falsified scores thereby providing unlawful opportunities for false contestant to emerge as winner.

Therefore, researches of various scholars were examined towards designing a highly secured e-voting system that would prevent corrupt politicians and election officers from rigging and any form of fraudulent activities. The world cannot trade a credible election for anything. This paper would create a platform to critically review papers and e-voting systems of different scholars, identify shortcomings for designing a highly secured evoting system using fingerprint biometric and visual semagram techniques.

• II.    Literature Review