Internet Voting

Ideally a system of internet voting should permit voting from any computer connected to the internet. This would allow people to vote from their own homes or while at work or even when abroad. But any such system must meet four main criteria:
1. Ability to verify that only citizens on the electoral roll can vote.
2. Ability to ensure that each citizen can only vote once at each election.
3. Ability to ensure that citizens can only vote for candidates standing within their own constituency.
4. The same level of secrecy as in manual voting (I.e. nothing to identify the voter from his or her vote ).
These in turn mean that there are some inevitable requirements of any internet voting system:
- To have a means of checking that voters exist on the electoral roll.
- To be able to identify the constituency of a voter.
- To identify each act of voting by a citizen in order to ensure that nobody votes more than once.
- At no stage in the system must there be any data connecting the identity of the voter to his or her vote.
All of these requirements are met by the system described here:-

A) Preparatory phase: In the run up to any general election a central body would create lists of randomly generated ‘voting numbers’ for each constituency. Each constituency’s list would contain sufficient numbers for all of its voters and the numbers would be unique to the constituency (thus enabling a national computer system to identify the constituency from them). The lists would be distributed to officially designated ‘electoral offices’ (these could be post offices, libraries, etc.) within the constituency, which would be run much like polling stations. Citizens intending to vote would go to their nearest electoral office and undertake a process of ‘assignment’ as follows:
1. Firstly it would be established that the citizen existed on the electoral roll and was eligible to vote within the constituency.
2. Then the citizen would choose a voting number from those remaining unselected on the constituency list and write this on an ‘assignment form’ (which would have no personally identifying details).
3. He or she would then enter the equivalent of a polling booth and, having decided on a self-invented password to go with the number would add this to the form.
4. Finally the form would be passed to an electoral official who would mark the voting number on the constituency list as ‘selected’ and update a nation-wide central computer system (by means of a networked terminal) with the association between the voting number and the password.
5. The citizen would be given back the assignment form as a record of his or her number and password for internet voting.
Because the assignment process permits the citizen to select his or her own voting number nothing on the assignment form identifies him or her and thus no data can exist anywhere on the central system linking the citizen’s identity with his or her chosen number (or password). This provides the basis for an equivalent level of secrecy in internet voting as currently exists in manual voting.
B) Voting phase: Citizens in possession of a voting number and password acquired through the assignment process would be able to vote at any computer linked to the internet. The citizen would simply open the election web page and enter their voting number and password. The central computer system would verify that these were valid and would be able to tell from the voting number which constituency the voter related to. It would then present only the names of candidates within that constituency and would allow the user to vote for one candidate only. The computer system would record the fact that a voting act had occurred for the particular voting number/password combination and would deny any subsequent attempts to login with them. In this way it would prevent the possibility of a citizen voting twice.

By making voting more convenient such a system could encourage greater voter participation. It could also readily be adapted for local and regional elections by distributing lists of numbers at the relevant level of constituency (e.g. local government ward, European government constituency, etc.).