Towards an Open Standard Vote Verification Framework in Electronic Voting Systems

Vote verification allows voters or other election participating entities to verify that votes are correctly captured, stored and counted. To facilitate the vote verification process, a number of verification techniques (either physical or digital) have been developed to provide an evidence to voters and other participating entities for the assurance of the integrity of election result. However, we observed that these techniques have a number of limitations among which, the fact that the existing techniques do not fully comply with verification requirements (e.g., public verifiability). They implement limited prevention mechanisms from known attacks and they are not based on interoperable components and processes (typically, vendor lock-in). In order to address these issues, we propose a new method for vote verification based on open standards which allows interested parties or organizations to participate in vote verification process so as to enhance transparency and capture vote threats and challenges during and after elections.