Process and Framework Description

Abstract

The first part of this book builds the foundation for the requirement definition by presenting, classifying and discussing different implementations of electronic voting and by discussing and analysing available requirement documents for electronic voting systems. Here, the advantages, disadvantages, problems, and vulnerabilities of each document are identified. Based on these fundamentals, a new list of requirements is developed in the second part of the book. This list combines and improves the existing requirement documents from Chap. 3. Strictly speaking there is not one list but two, one for stand-alone direct recording voting machines and one for remote electronic voting systems.

The fourth chapter describes the process to obtain the final list of requirements. The development process includes the development of a glossary, the definition of syntax and semantics, a detailed description of the target of evaluation, the development of a first draft of requirements, the incorporation of existing literature, the provision for the election principles, the defence of identified threats, and the classification in different sub-lists. In order to work with election principles and threats, both concepts are explained in the second part. It is important to know this process to understand why it is claimed that the list is standardised, consistent, and exhaustive.

There are three aspects of electronic voting which are not further discussed in this book: election observation, verifiability, and vote updating. These aspects are neither taken into account for the definition of requirements nor for the evaluation methodology. As these aspects are important and might be included in an extended version of the later framework, their main ideas and challenges are discussed in this chapter.