Unifying Electronic and Remote Voting

Abstract

The voting scenario is rich and complex: democratic institutions typically call several kinds of elections, which often have different requirements in terms of costs and needed resources, and are exposed to different security risks. Some electoral events could target relatively small sets of voters, sparsely distributed across the country or even in the world: a typical example is the election for renewing the board of directors of an association or research center. On the other hand, Government or public-office elections typically involve a great number of voters who, in most part, are localized within a country or a regional area. As a consequence, the design, development and deployment of electronic voting systems suitable to accommodate the wide range of conflicting requirements emerging from such different voting scenarios is still a challenging issue. This chapter presents u-Vote, a solution which is able to operate in different deployment settings, so as to accommodate the peculiarities characterizing different voting scenarios, while striving to provide the best possible balance between security measures and convenience for voters.