Author:
Boris Shishkov
Affiliation:
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences / IICREST, Bulgaria
Keyword(s):
eVoting, Conceptual Model, Requirements, Architecture.
Abstract:
The latest advances in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are changing our society, but
have different implications on different domains. Some domains, such as the digital content –based
businesses, are enjoying (almost) full ICT utilization whereas other domains, assuming physical and/or
societal and/or “intuitive” inputs, are much less successful in terms of digitization. Voting using digital
technology (or “eVoting” for short) is in between those domains since: (i) the mere process of voting is a very
good “candidate” for digitization but at the same time (ii) the “surrounding” societal aspects are often difficult
to “frame” as Internet-based services. (i) can be seen from the “voting through computer” observed in several
European countries while (ii) can be seen from the lack (to date) of technology-enabled systems completely
supporting the voting process and its related aspects. Further, the conceptualization and implementation of
any voting system is to originat
e from legislation – this makes the goal of resolving (i) + (ii) even more
challenging. Hence, to benefit from ICT, the question remains what should be done and how it should be
done. The step from legislation to requirements and implementations taking into account socio-technical
aspects, is crucial for the successful realization of eVoting. Despite its relevance, this has been given hardly
sufficient attention in literature. This void is addressed by the current position paper; the contribution of the
paper is two-fold: we firstly propose a general technology-independent conceptual model on voting and on
this basis, we propose requirements for (partially) digitizing this process. Requirements are dependent on the
societal context and therefore we opted for focusing on one particular EU country where the transition to
eVoting is currently under discussion. We have planned as future research to reflect the identified
requirements into architectures and implementations, and to get experts’ feedback on this.
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