An Enterprise Information Architecture for eVoting

Around 1400 ballots got missed in 2013, during the elections in Australia. This resulted in the re-run of elections in the nation which cost around $21 million and was considered as damage for the reputation of Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) (Poloni, 2015). The entire investigation regarding the ballot missing was carried out by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters and in its investigation it was founded that the reason behind the missing of ballot slips is the physical transportation of ballot slips to the counting centre in Perth. To rectify the problems that are faced during the election, the committee suggested 24 recommendations to the AEC in its report (Connolly, 2004). This report consists of several improvement procedures that can be implemented to improve the existing election procedure and for avoiding such miss happenings in the future. One recommendation by the committee was implementation of electronic voting system. Today, almost every organization is becoming information based and hence, in order to achieve these improvements organizations are developing Enterprise Information Architecture

Today, enterprises are becoming more information based whether it is private organization or a public sector. To assure their competitiveness, organizations are making improvements in the information activities on their top most priorities. Key approach in order to achieve these improvements is developing an Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA) (Techopedia, 2018). For any democratic process, voting is a critical component. In 2013, during the elections in Australia, 1370 ballots got missed and it was considered as the biggest failure of Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) in the history. To re-run the Senate election in Australia, it cost around $21 million to the country and was considered as the unprecedented damage to the reputation of AEC (Ayo et al., 2011). The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters was given the investigation for missing ballot slips. In its investigation committee found that ballot slips were missed due to the physical transportation of ballot slips to the counting centre in Perth. The committee handed over a report to the AEC that consist of 24 recommendations in order to improve the existing electoral process and to avoid such miss happenings in future. One recommendation out of all is using the electronic voting system instead of ballot slips system. Therefore, with the use of enterprise information architecture, this report will discuss on the reference architecture that can be implemented in Australia for conducting lection in the country (Matters, 2014).

There is a long list of benefits that EIA RA approach can provide in developing a system for electronic voting. An EIA provides framework for planning and implementing a standard based, rich, digital information infrastructure with well integrated activities and services. These benefits are as below:

• Mobility: with the use of enterprise information architecture, such a system can be developed for the electronic voting where people are allowed to cast their vote from anywhere in the world. It allows location independent method for casting their vote with the help of internet.
• Security and Reliability: Reference architecture for electronic voting can be developed using the cloud computing technology. Cloud has the capability of analysing a large amount of data. It can easily detect any kind of redundancy and discrepancy. Enhanced security in cloud computing is mainly due to the universal architecture and centralization of data. Cloud provides mechanism for the reliability and the security of data by comparing the voters’ Unique Identification (UID) number from the database with the voter, and also collects and counts the votes in the data centre of Australian Electoral Commission(Achieng & Ruhode, 2013).
• Economies of Scale and Cost Effectiveness: Regardless of the deployment model, cloud implementation tends to be as large as possible to benefit from economies of scale. In order to lower the cost, large cloud deployments are mainly located near the cheap power stations.
• Increased Citizen Participation: Citizen’s participation can be increased using the electronic voting system. As voters will get the facility of casting their vote from anywhere and at any time, this will provide them an easy of casting their vote(Aph, 2012).

To elaborate the benefits of enterprise information architecture reference architecture, below a proposed model that can be developed using the cloud computing technology. This model allows user to interact with the election commission with the help of clouds (Ayo et al., 2011).

Source: (Okediran, 2015)

This model clearly provides the flexibility and mobility to the citizens’ as they can easily register and cast their vote from anywhere and anytime. It is also providing the benefit of restoring and backup for the user data and the casted votes. Below is the logical architecture of the electronic voting (Frankland et al., 2011).

Benefits of EIA RA for eVoting in Australia

Source: (Howard, 2017)

There are mainly 5 main security functions in an electronic module:

Identification & Authorisation: Voters can be identified by using either MinID or National ID card of the voter. Voting terminals used by the voters are authenticated using the calling IP address and provided SSL client certificate. All users except the voters are authenticated through RBAC access control. Users are authenticated by using user ID and password. It will generate a RBAC token that tells about the granted user. A RBAC token generally has the information regarding a unique ID, name of operator, election event, date and time of creation and expiration, role information and accesses (Auspostenterprise, 2017).

RBAC token will be verified by electronic voting by means of:

• Token encryption password is requested from the user and in order to use this password for decrypting the token.
• Verification of RBAC digital signature.
• Checking the validity of RBAC digital certificate that is used for verifying the signature.
• Verification of election event.
• Verification of creation time that is not in future.
• Verification of expiration time that is not in the past.

Authorisations are of two types which include authorisation of voter for eVoting and authorisation of election officials, auditors, and members of electoral board.

 Authorisation of voters is checked through checking the eligibility of voter. Authentication server checks the eligibility of voter by receiving an authentication token and verifying the information in the authentication token like digital signature and certificate, unique ID, and expiration time (Connolly, 2004). Authentication server then extracts the ID of voter from the identification token and then sends the voter ID to the electoral roll service and request to verify the voter. Once the voter’s eligibility is verified, then the server will perform the authorisation verification for the voter. Voter’s authorisation is verified three times. First verification is performed in the VCS when a vote is received from the voter. Second verification is done in the RCG when a vote is received from the VCS, and third verification is performed in the cleansing component when whole ballot is verified (Gibson et al., 2010).

Process Integrity and Accuracy: Vote casting, safe storing of votes, processing and counting of votes is done by the Electronic Voting Software. Elections are critical task and voter and polling confidentiality and polling integrity need to be protected. To manage and protect the security of process, there are three information flows are defined: Election Management, Voting Process, and the Tallying Process (Poloni, 2015).

Cryptographic Support: Every critical operation and the information asset are protected using a cryptographic mechanism that ensures the confidentiality of information, integrity, and the authenticity (Okediran, 2015).

Security Audit: All the components of eVoting system send a copy of the logs to the audit system. It is done because if any component or the system is broken, a copy of the log is always accessible (Sambo & Alexander, 2018).

Source: (Darwish & El-Gendy, 2017)

This model consists of three phases that are first is pre-election phase, second is election phase and the third is post-election phase.

Pre-election phase allows the citizens or the voters to get them registered with the electoral commission. Here people with the help of electronic gadgets and internet, register them on the electoral commission database. Information stored in the database is sent to the central server and stored there forever for the future use (Howard, 2017).

Election phase consist of three steps which include login, authentication, and vote casting. Voter is first requires to login on the website of the electoral commission. After login, system authenticates the user by matching the voter information in the database and if the user is authenticate then allows the voter to cast his/ her vote. His vote is again stored in the database and further sent to the central server (Lauer, 2004).

Proposed Model for Electronic Voting in Australia

Post-election phase consist of counting of votes. It requires login of the administration to get access on the portal. After login, vote counting can be done and the result of counting is displayed and sent to the central server (Frankland et al., 2011).

Electronic Voting Process

Now the implementation of the architecture that is designed above for the eVoting system is the main challenge. This report is completed this challenge by giving a top-down structure for requirements (Okediran, 2015). Following are the challenges that are faced during maintaining requirements for the electronic voting machine are:

1. Information Sources: implementation of electronic machines for the voting requires various documents containing high level recommendations and principles. Transition from paper ballot to electronic elections needs compilation of various acts that regulates elections. The integration and retention of the traceability of the actual machine requirements from these principles becomes an important aspect in order to guarantee effective management of the requirements(Galliers & Leidner, 2014).
2. Software Configuration: To conduct the various operations like voting, counting, and many others, it requires management of complex configurations and logical sections that will allow for the modularized program.
3. Hardware Configuration: Implementation of various hardware devices like PC, LCD display, BIOS, and Printers is needed.
4. Integrations with Electoral Procedures: New voting machines are required to compatible with the existing electoral laws. eVoting procedure should be familiar to the voters and for that it should be as much similar to the manual as possible(Dhillon, 2015).
5. Denial of Service Attack: In 2003, during the elections in Virginia, it was found that many voting machines tried to send results at the same time. This created a huge traffic jam and led to delay in the result declaration for one day. Hence, proper management of traffic is needed for successfully implementing the electronic system.

To address the challenges mentioned above, a careful planned strategy that will meet the requirements is described below:

Information regarding users is mainly collected from the public and government documents. The Australian laws have given specification for the electronic voting process. Voting machines designed for the eVoting should be compatible with the laws (Sambo & Alexander, 2018). Principles are the high level requirements that define the boundaries for the automation and system goals. This includes allowing the user for reviewing his/her choices before casting the vote. Data associated with voters is collected from the various sources and stored in the central server. Sources for the data collection include information from hospitals, from organizations, and from universities. This data is unstructured data and there would be chances of occurring redundancy which need to be rectified. Structured data is collected from the governmental documents where each citizen is assigned a unique ID.

To conduct the electronic voting, it requires various software and mechanism for conducting user login and authentication, exercising votes over the internet, counting of votes and several others. Developing software and implementing it, will be done by the government and this process is time consuming as well as expensive too. Main concerns in electronic voting are system reliability and system security (Sambo & Alexander, 2018). Keeping the confidentiality of the voting is mandatory in order to protect the democratic right and for this public and private key cryptography is used for secure the communication between the two parties. Authentication of the user is also important to identify the eligible voter and for this unique ID of user is used to confirm the eligible voter. Using digital signatures eliminate repudiation problem from the electronic voting.

Another concern associated with electronic voting is that government needs to provide training to the public about the new technology of voting and also to inform about the new system.

Conclusion

Therefore, it can be concluded that electronic voting system in Australia will provide several benefits to the country and will help in eliminating the issues associated with the manual or ballot paper voting system. After missing of around 1400 ballot slips in 2013 elections, the Joint Standing Committee found main reason behind missing of ballot slips is physical transportation of ballot slips to the counting location. Hence, committee suggested Australian Electoral Commission to conduct the election process using technology that is electronic voting. Enterprise Information Architecture plays vital role in every organization for developing reference architectures for conducting the business activities and doing the business with ease. In this paper, a proposed model is described which can be used for conducting the electronic voting by using cloud technology with the help of internet. Implementation of electronic voting system has several issues like collecting information about the voters and preparing a database of the user, implementation of different software and hardware configuration, and several others. In addition to that there are many other issues related to the system reliability and system security. Three phases are important in electronic voting that is pre-election phase, election phase, and the post-election phase. Pre-election phase includes registering voters on the website of election commission and creating a database of the voter. This provides user access to the portal to cast his vote. Only eligible voters are registered. During election, users login at the portal and provide the required details for verifying the eligible voter. System server verifies the user by matching the details with the stored data and provides access only to the eligible voter. Post-election includes vote counting, auditing and the result display. Electronic voting has the advantage of mobility and gives flexibility to the voters.

There are few things that must be kept in mind while designing a architecture for the electronic voting system. Architecture should be simple that can be understood by voters easily and they can exercise their votes without any problems. Processors should be faster so that voting errors can be reduced. They must ensure to have a well-structured and secured cyber security services so that electronic voting data can be kept safe. There should be some methods where voters can review their votes to make sure they have correctly voted their votes.

References

Achieng, M. & Ruhode, E., 2013. The adoption and challenges of electronic voting technologies within the South African context. arXiv preprint arXiv.

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Okediran, O., 2015. Sequence Diagram of the Proposed E-voting System. [Online] Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Sequence-Diagram-of-the-Proposed-E-voting-System-scans-the-PVC-and-the-voters_fig2_284146629.

Poloni, G.D., 2015. Missing Senate ballot boxes may have fallen off a truck, committee finds. [Online] Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-15/senate-ballot-boxes-may-have-fallen-off-truck-committee-finds/6395716.

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Techopedia, 2018. Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA). [Online] Available at: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/30587/enterprise-information-architecture-eia.