Managing Democracy the IT Way

8/8/2019 Managing Democracy the IT Way

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MANAGING DEMOCRACY

The IT Way.

Prashant Saurabh

10BM60062

Vinod Gupta school of management.

IIT Kharagpur.



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India the largest democracy in the world, with more than 720 million registered voters, faces

the problem of one of the lowest voter turnout of around 59%.The maximum share of votes for

the most popular alliance was little over 20% i.e. the government ruling the country is having

the trust of just 1 out of 5 persons.

Some people says the inability of the older system which is running out of pace with this fast

changing world, where man today is really a global citizen and is not constrained to

geographical boundaries.

Internet voting is considered as the panacea of this entire problem but there are many

constraints for the successful execution of the same ranging from scalability to security to

technology. In this ever advancing world of technology yes its quite difficult but not impossible

to achieve the true essence of democracy through internet voting system.



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India the largest democracy in the world, with more than 720 million registered voters, faces

the problem of one of the lowest voter turnout of around 59%.The maximum share of votes for

the most popular alliance was little over 20% i.e. the government ruling the country is having

the trust of just 1 out of 5 persons.

The worst part of this low voter turnout is that the youth who are considered as the change

factor of our country are the prime victims. The youths who has to take the burden of this

country on their shoulders and whom we describe as our biggest asset and hope as the

panacea for our entire problem at every fronts is not able to vote. The literates and the so

called intellectuals of our society alienate themselves from voting or have genuine reasons of

not able to cast the vote. It will not be wrong to say that for a greater chunk of our population

Election Day is just like a holiday, but again these are the people who do complain most

about the existing system.

Apart from the low voter turnout there are various problems which are associated with the

current electoral system like the credibility of the government, rising cost of election, every

year there will be at least one or two major election in the country, which will cost billions of

rupees to the country leave apart the security which is required to be deployed at each and

every polling station. The current process runs for a long time and there can be some factor

which can swing the elections in any ones favour. The buzz all around is about going

electronic people take pride in talking in digital terms and they are raising question if this is

the world of ³e-commerce´, ³e-governance´ then why not ³e-elections´.

The question is how to change the current scenario, how to involve people in the changeprocess, how to ensure maximum participation? Whether the mandatory voting as a law is the

answer or it will kill the essence of democracy itself. Can the rapid changing technology be of

any use yet maintaining the privacy, authenticity and integrity of elections and has the ability

to broaden the horizons of democracy.

Internet voting is considered as the panacea of all these problems but there are many

constraints for the successful execution of the same ranging from scalability to security to

technology. The main constraint is to maintain the authenticity and integrity of the process,

but yes in this ever advancing world of technology its quite difficult but not impossible to

achieve the true essence of democracy through internet voting system.



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What is internet voting?

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connected to a remote server .

The internet voting system in pr inciple resembles very much to the traditional system. Internet

voting system is cer tainly a better option compared to other option li e email voting and mail

voting hich are considered as the other alternate to voting over internet.

Fig

Block

iagram of Internet voting system.

1 Block Diagram Of Internet voting by Epp Maaten



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2Fig 2 Architecture diagram of Internet voting system.

As shown in the architecture diagram the first step in the internet voting process will be the

authentication of the user , the user will be able to cast the vote f rom a designated location or

his personal computer . A whole set of software programs will run automatically as soon as the

user will try to register him f or voting, and communication will be established between the

services like the voter list database and key management database along with other secur ity

system if in place like finger pr int database or f ace recognition database through Simple

Ob ject Access Protocol

f or the ver ification of the user . The message sent will be in X L

f ormat and will be authenticated against the inf ormation available on the backend system.

Once the inf ormation regarding the user is ver ified then he will able to enter basic inf ormation

like the constituency or the geographical location f rom where he is casting hi vote and also

2 Architecture of Internet Voting By Mugisha Boniface



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about the place for which he wants to vote, again these information will be validated against

the information present in the backend system. A log will be generated for the authentic

verification of the user and his keys will be destroyed at this moment only prohibiting him to

cast another vote. The candidate list will be displayed to the user containing all the

information regarding the candidate. The time counter will start running as soon as the

candidate list is displayed on the screen so that the user can¶t be influenced or he can¶t make

any security threats to the system. inally the vote casted will be sent to the vote tallying

server. The whole architecture is based on client server platform which will be supported by

IIS or tomcat web server and weblogic application server. A load balancer will be required to

direct the requests uniformly to the web server< a PIX firewall and intrusion detection system

will work along with the secured service layer of VPN, the tally server and the database and

the authentication verification server will be kept in highly secured zone. Communication will

proceed via S

AP and HTTPS protocols which will hide the true location of the voter.

nly

the location of the virtual directory will be displayed by the admin web servers which will inturn will be decoded by the application server. There will two layer of firewall and intrusion

detection system between the client and the web server and again between the application

server and the database as soon as an intrusion or threat will be detected an alarm will be

generated.

Various steps involved in the internet voting system are:-

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ne of the primary requirement of internet voting system is to

identify voters, this will be done electronically and also the online verification of the

voters. The Unique Identification number provided by the government of India will

serve the primary purpose, also the various security passwords will help for

identification of the voter. The security will further be increased by online verification

of voters by his fingerprint and face recognition at time of voting online.

y Only 0 ne 1

0

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e:- The voters should be able to vote only once and this can be easily

maintained by refusing the further connection to the voter if his information tallies with

the information that is present in the database of the central system.

y Maintaining the authenti 3 4

5 te: - The votes casted by the voter should be authentic

till the counting process completes, i.e. no one should be in a position to alter the

casted vote. Proper encryption techniques should be adopted for the transference of

votes from the personal/public computer to the central server system. Also proper

technologies should be adopted that in presence of 6 ocal election officers only this

votes be counted and can¶t be accessed by a single person.

y Legitimate and T7 ustworthy:- The most important aspect of internet voting system

is it trustworthiness among the masses and its legitimacy in the election results, for



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this proper training should be provided by the election commission to bothe the voters

and also the Local election officials to prevent eleventh hour problems.

Various methods of internet voting system8 9

@ urrently there are two proposed method of internet voting:A

y Poll site internet voting

y Remote site internet voting

Poll site internet votingB C

In poll site internet voting the voters will be able to cast vote most

likely in the current traditional voting system where he will be using a public computer system

or kiosk like f acilities which will be under the surveillance of local election officer .This method

is more secure and pr ivacy is more manageable also it avoids the digital divide also it

prevents vote selling and coercion, but this system will not eff ectively manage the students,

travelers and military personal.



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3 Fig 3 Poll site internet voting system.

Remote site internet votingD E

In remote site internet voting the voter will be able to cast his vote f rom his personal computer , which will not be under the control of thelocal election

officer but as soon as the request is made through the browser to connect to the central

system to cast the vote it will be under the surveillance of election officials.

4Fig 4 Remote site internet voting system.

As depicted in the architecture diagram the voter uses a web browser as his tool and

downloads the required software f rom the central system. The communication between the

browser and the central system is protected by encryption and identification tool off ered by

the

F

Secured service layer´ protocol. An

F

Active X´ control window will pop up on the browser

to run the specific software online f or saf eguarding the voting system.

3 Security requirements of Internet Voting system By Booz, Allen, Hamilton4 Security requirements of Internet Voting system By Booz, Allen, Hamilton



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Managing G

oter s anonymity:- To maintain the voters anonymity is of the crucial and

daunting task in internet voting system, this can be done through the following logic.

The voter along with his digital signature will submit a pair consisting of his name and triply

encrypted vote which will be denoted by ³V3´, then after the elections are over then a total

count of every valid vote will be taken the condition for a valid vote should be like it should

contain the voter¶s digital signature and the triply encrypted vote and that should match

against the voter¶s signature or name in the electoral register. This system will ensure that

only one vote is there against a particular voter.

Electronic ballot box.

VOTERS

5Fig 5. The process of getting the

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ote.

To make the whole process anonymous all the valid votes are collected at a particular

location in an encrypted format and nothing can be made out of that also they don¶t contain

any details of the voters, and then the votes are feed to a scrambler which decrypts the valid

votes to one level and it acts as a feed for the 2nd

scrambler which can take data in the format

provided by scrambler 1 only, the output for this will act as a input for the 3rd

scrambler which

finally will depict that the vote was in favour of which candidate. All the three scrambler must

be under control of different users at remote locations and can take and produce data in the

predefined format only and the sequence of decrypted votes must also change at every trial,

thus until and unless all the three scramblers are not present a the given location and are notin the control of a single authority it will not be possible to find the voters corresponding to the

particular vote. Then finally all the decrypted valid votes will be feed to the counter to validate

and count and hence publish the results.

5 Techn H lH I

P and Ad Q iniR S T

ati H n in electi H n proced U re, SOU2000:125

Votes Electoral sheet

Alpha x3

Beta y3

Gamma z3

Alpha

Beta

Gamma

Valid

votes.

X3

Y3

Z3



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V or final counting

Encrypted valid votes Decrypted votes

6Fig 6 Process of decrypting and counting

W

alid W

otes.

Problems in internet W

oting system in India: - Its easier said than done, and this phrase

holds good in its totality when it comes to internet voting system, Successful implementation

of internet voting will be more like making an elephant dance. The major problems associated

with implementation of internet voting system is India are as follows

y Scalability

y Technology

y Security

Scalability:- India is a country of 1.2 billion people and having more than 720 million

registered voters. To accomplish the project of this much scale will be a daunting task,

particularly when more than half of the voters are still illiterate. The internet penetration in our

country is still amongst the lowest in the world around 6%. The best of servers in the world

6 Technology and Administration in election proced X re, SOU2000:125

X3

Y3

Z3

W3

X2

Y2

Z2

W2

X1

Y1

Z1

W1

X

Y

Z

W

S1 S2 S3



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are currently able to handle 30000 hits at a particular moment, before they crash out. To

successfully implement the scheme needs massive boost in infrastructure otherwise its still a

distant dream.

Technology:- In a country like India where elections are rigged and cyber attacks are much

frequent it will be very difficult to make the elections impartial also a massive expense will be

incurred to make the system full proof against hacking, a lot of money will be needed in

monitoring and educating people about the process.To conduct internet ³Remote site internet

voting´ and maintain the current security level will be a difficult task with all the security

software and hardware in place.

Secur ity:- The main concern regarding the internet voting system is the security threat at

each and every step be it at the client side the server side or between the two that is the

communication channel. Be it the voter registration to the final counting of votes internet

voting system is prone to security. Internet voting faces threats from viruses, Trojans and

worms also blocking the path is common thing. Proper implementation of digital signature and

encryption tools along with firewalls and antivirus are needed to make system full proof.The

system needs multiple layers of security before being implemented to full scale. Everything

from browser to server to database needs to be intact and secured.



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Conclusion:-

Democracies across the globe are facing the stiff problem of lower voter turnout. Internet

voting certainly has the potential to increase this turnout; this is evident from the recent

experiments of internet voting in state election of Y lorida and California in USA. Also

encouraging trends are there in various countries of European Union. The main road blocks

for internet based voting right now are security threats and social divide. With emerging

technologies and its implication in economic development internet voting will be feasible

option in western countries in near future. Countries like India have to cover some ground

before it can implement internet voting to full scale , not only the social challenges are there

but also a massive boost in infrastructure in all domains are needed to make it happen. To

make internet voting a more feasible option in near future advancement in technologies is

very much needed and full proof security should be incorporated to mobile device and ATM¶s

so that these can be used for internet voting. The density of mobile and reach of ATM and

also the ease of application of these devices make them obvious choice over internet.The

internet voting system will be a highly viable option from the financial aspect also once the

infrastructure is in place. The best part of this system will be that a lot of employment will also

be generated in the IT sector for the implementation, government will able to cut the cost of

deploying paramilitary forces on the poll site and will not be a financial burden to the country.

̀ nce internet voting will be implemented it will not only increase the voter turnout but will also

be secured and faster means of channeling democracy.



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REFERENCES:-

y election commission of India

y Electronic Voting system, wi a ipedia

y www.ebaltics.com/00704985

y Technology and administration in internet voting system S U2000:125

y Security requirements for internet voting system by Allen, Booz, Hamilton

y A secure internet based voting system for low ICT resourced countries By

Mugisha Boniface

y A security analysis of the secure electronic registration and voting expe riment

(SERVE) By

Dr. David Jefferson

Dr. Aviel D Rubin

Dr. Barbara Simons

Dr. David Wagner

Managing Democracy the IT Way

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