Towards Modernizing the Future of American Voting

With the proliferation of computing and information technologies, we have an opportunity to envision a fully participatory democracy in the country through a fully digitized voting platform. However, the growing interconnectivity of systems and people across the globe, and the proliferation of cybersecurity issues pose a significant bottleneck towards achieving such a vision. In this paper, we discuss a vision to modernize our voting processes and discuss the challenges for creating a national e-voting framework that incorporates policies, standards and technological infrastructure that is secure, privacy-preserving, resilient and transparent. Through partnerships among private industry, academia, and State and Federal Government, technology must be the catalyst to develop a national platform for American voters. Along with integrating biometrics to authenticate each registered voter for transparency and accountability, the platform provides depth in the e-voting infrastructure with emerging blockchain technologies. We outline the way voting process runs today with the challenges; states are having from funding to software development concerns. Additionally, we highlight attacks from malware infiltrations from off the shelf products made from factories from countries such as China. This paper illustrates a strategic level of voting challenges and modernizing processes that will enhance the voter's trust in America democracy.