UVote: A Ubiquitous E-voting System

Abstract

Traditional e-voting systems replace the paper-based process with an electronic one at official voting locations. Remote e-voting, where the voter can vote from any location, increases both participation rates in the elections and the user's satisfaction as it eases the voting process and saves time. However, having a remote e-voting system increases the security vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities include harder user authentication, possibility of malicious software on the user's devices, network malicious nodes, coercion, and vote-selling. We introduce UVote as a ubiquitous, convenient, verifiable, and incoercible democratic e-voting system. UVote works as a front-end to many of the current traditional e-voting systems, providing the user with a convenient voting solution with guarantees on security, achieving the best of both worlds. The key design principal in UVote is redundancy at system architecture different components, including voting devices, vote verification, and allowing voting multiple times. We present the UVote architecture and how it leverages redundancy to achieve its goals. We also analyze the different possible attacks and how UVote combats them. Evaluation of the system performance shows that these advantages come with minimal performance overhead. This highlights that UVote is a truly ubiquitous e-voting system.