Internet voting: concerns and solutions

Internet voting systems, catering to different requirements, have been widely implemented and used. Some have been successful, while others have experienced unexpected problems. This paper overviews the concerns of using Internet voting and tries to give solutions. Tradeoffs between the advantages and disadvantages of employing Internet voting are also addressed. A simple protocol is designed to show that technical problems identified in the literature can be solved fairly easily, though some seem subtle. This study reveals that the main concerns of adopting Internet voting for critical elections are not cryptographic tools, but hardware and software reliability, and social and political issues. After discussing possible concerns about Internet voting and possible solutions or comments, we propose steps to enable Internet voting to be adopted even for critical elections.