Paper Vote Canada

Mass-scale systems intended to deliver e-Government in a democratic context pose a range of under-explored design problems. In particular, we are far from having identified a core set of requirements for such systems. The need for confidentiality, privacy, transparency, accountability and user control are all critical to the success of such systems yet we are still far from determining how to implement such requirements and how the design of such systems will affect user behaviour. In this workshop we aim to address these very broad issues in general together with a more focused examination of e-voting as an exemplar of e-government systems. This exemplar provides a sharp characterisation of many of the issues and design tradeoffs we encounter in many e-Government systems. Despite support for trial and adoption of new voting technologies by the government, which sees electronic voting as a means of increasing turnout, we have not seen wide-scale adoption of the technology. E-voting requirements cover topics as varied as privacy/anonymity, authentication, verifiability, flexibility (with respect to different electoral systems) and usability. In addition, there is a need to specify the requirements for a trusted electronic voting system for UK elections. The diversity of issues suggest deployment of e-voting requires an interdisciplinary approach.

[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 10:47 am