Understanding the Development Trends of Electronic Voting Systems

During the past few years a huge interests in e-voting has occurred, which resulted in a significant funding for e-voting research and development (R&D) projects with the aim of developing trustworthy e-voting systems. Although it is good that major e-voting development trends are capitalizing on previous R&D efforts in other domains, it is difficult to say that the necessary R&D efforts has been utilized to realize the vision and principles of e-voting. Today, we now have a much better understanding of the issues that pose the development of a trustworthy e-voting system. In this paper, we categorize and analyze the most important research and development trends in e-voting systems. We identify the lessons learned from these projects and analyze whether the existing R&D projects meet the identified flaws in past. Finally, based on these results the way to the future of e-voting R&D is postulated.