Online Election Voting Could Be Possible By 2020 - Birmingham Research

Prof. Mark Ryan and his research team at the University of Birmingham have developed a system called 'Du-Vote' that lets citizens cast their election vote online. Thanks to their latest breakthrough in security technology, the system has been so developed that people can vote from the comfort of their homes even if their own PC is infected with virus. Du-Vote is a remote electronic voting protocol that operates by sharing a simple hardware token (a device the size of a credit card) with the voter, the voters’s computer, and a server run by election authorities. The Birmingham researchers believe that their system will be ready to use by 2020 or 2025 General Election.

For verifying, statistically high probability is used even if all these machines are controlled by the opponent, and privacy is taken care of as long as at least either the voter’s computer or the server is not controlled by the adversary. When components of the system are found to be malicious, he security of the protocol is analysed to determine the extent to which privacy and verifiability are maintained. The independent security device is the core of this project as it has a small code base and is not susceptible to viruses.


Many existing e-voting systems do not tackle the problem of potentially undetectable source of vote manipulation or breach of voter privacy. The Du-Vote system not only tries to prevent a voting fraud from happening, but there's also a provision for detecting an electoral fraud in case a hostile adversary controls the entire computing infrastructure.

The team's research paper ‘Du-Vote: Remote Electronic Voting with Untrusted Computers’ was recently presented at a conference in Italy.

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