Investigating Parallel Implementations of Electronic Voting Verification and Tallying Processes

Electronic voting systems are adopted in several countries to provide accuracy and efficiency for the electoral processes. However, e-voting systems employ complex cryptographic and verification techniques to satisfy security and privacy requirements. The verification and tallying processes take unacceptable execution times in large elections. This paper overcomes this problem and reduces this time using parallel processing. We have implemented the voting, verification, and tallying processes described in the Secure National Electronic Voting System (S-Vote). We have developed and evaluated three alternative parallel schemes for these processes: Task, Master/Salve, and Data. The Data scheme shows best speedup and efficiency and scales well as the numbers of voters and processing cores are increased. In this scheme, a number of threads dynamically request and process ballot packages. This scheme processes 64,000 ballot using 32 cores in 0.71 hours with 27.5 speedup and 86% efficiency. Therefore, a large national election of 2 million ballots can be processed in an acceptable time of 5.5 hours using 128 cores. Larger elections can be verified and tallied in acceptable time using more processing cores.