Postal Voting

Details

Supervisors

Pereira, Olivier

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] en cybersécurité, à finalité spécialisée: conception et analyse de systèmes

Abstract

Voting is a fundamental element within our democratic countries. We here focus on remote voting, an alternative option for those who are unable to get to the voting booths on the specific voting date. The COVID-19 pandemic reminded how remote voting is vital for our democracies and therefore we find that securing this process is of the highest concern. This study proposes state-of-the-art postal voting-related approaches and how security improvements can be addressed, specifically for the Belgian Federal elections for citizens living abroad. This study focuses on the Vote-by-Mail options for which four possible scenarios are studied, where three of them do include End-2-End verifiability for paper-based ballot voting, by relying on cryptographic features, and some of them relying for citizen authentication on the Belgian e-ID card. The first scenario is a detailed illustration of a typical traditional Vote-by-Mail solution, to describe the fundamentals which will be used for the other 3 scenario explanations. The second scenario is a personal proposal, inspired/derived and elaborated from the US ElectionGuard (Benaloh, 2021) and STAR-Vote (Bell, 2013) voting systems, applied to the Vote-by-Mail case. The third scenario is a paper-based solution, named STROBE-Voting (Benaloh J., Sept. 2021), with some personal adaptations for the Belgian election’s specificities, as the STROBE-Voting was initially developed for the US election case. The fourth scenario was proposed by a Belgian inter-university consortium for the NETVOTING_BE (part 2) study (Pilet J.B., 2021) in which an innovative Vote-by-Mail solution has been described.