Observing Threats to Voters Anonymity: Election Observation of Electronic Voting
Robert Krimmer, Melanie Volkamer · Repository KITopen (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) · 2008
Electronic voting, as one of the main applications of Electronic Democracy, has come to the attention of many governments in their movement to modernize elections.Although very popular with many visionaries and politicians, there is a lot of controversy for the use of electronic means in elections.Especially in young democracies, so-called democracies in transition have to invite international election observers to raise the level of transparency and to calm discussions.There exists a lot of documentation and guidelines on the topic of election observation of paper-based voting.As the observation of electronic voting processes is very new, there exists little to no experience with it.In this paper, the authors present a model for how to detect threats to the voter's anonymity using common criteria methodology.The work is based on experiences in the 2005 parliamentary elections in Venezuela, as evoting experts to audit the parliamentarian elections where e-voting machines with a voter verifiable audit trail were used.To do so, a background on electronic voting in Venezuela is first given; then the Common Criteria methodology is described and applied it to the e-voting process.Finally, a summarized model of how to observe elections with electronic voting machines is discussed.