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Manual voting schemes continuously suffer from declining voter participation due to the user unfriendly election process. One of the major limitations of a Polling Station Voting (PSV) mechanism (for both manual voting and electronic voting) is the decreased voter turnout. A solution for improving the voter turnout is to introduce Remote Poll Station (RPS) voting along with the conventional poll site voting. RPS voting and remote Internet voting (I-voting) together have the flexibility of allowing voters to participate in an election, no matter where they are physically at the moment of voting. RPS Electronic voting (e-voting) is committed for a convenient and efficient process for recording and tallying of the votes. It combines the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and strategies in political and governance processes. In general, e-voting automates and simplifies the election process. Furthermore, it speeds up; increases participation rates, reduces counting mistakes and minimizes the time for announcing the results.
About thirty countries were using electronic voting machines in their political elections. Of these, nine countries have dropped the e-voting projects after the pilot implementations. Seven countries are in the pilot stage. Currently only eleven countries are using e-voting methods for their political elections. Among this, only three countries are using electronic voting machines for their entire elections which include India, Brazil, and Venezuela. Most of the other countries have adopted a combination of different e-voting or I-voting technologies with conventional methods to address the different challenges. Estonia is the only one country which uses Internet voting on a nationwide level (2011–Parliamentary Elections). Most of the other countries have adopted I-voting as a solution for the overseas voters or voters in the defense sector. Some other countries have limited this facility to selected regions (ACE Project, 2012).
RPS voting and remote Internet voting (I-voting) together have fascinated increasing attention in cryptographic research. A potential protocol presented by Juels et al. (2005) generally referred to as the JCJ protocol is now extensively discussed. Even though this protocol was published in 2005, it is considered as the well accepted backend protocol for RPS voting and remote Internet voting that offers individual verifiability, receipt-freeness and moreover coercion resistance simultaneously. However it cannot be adopted in practice due to its meager efficiency. Although many improvements have been proposed, all of them either requires unrealistic trust assumptions or turned out to be insecure. This paper presents an improvement of the JCJ protocol, which needs only linear time while holding all other security requirements and without any unrealistic trust assumptions.
Next section describes the major challenges to e-voting system and it is followed by the necessity of cryptographic voting protocols. A detailed study of the related literature is made in the following section which is concluded with the justification of this work. The third section illustrates the research methodology of this paper. Framework of the proposed voting method is presented in the fourth section, which includes voting model, voting lifecycle, protocol and algorithms. Performance analysis of the proposed scheme is done in the fifth section. Detailed discussion of the proposed method which includes the applicability of the scheme in the Indian general elections and limitations of the system is made in the sixth section. The last section gives the conclusion of the paper.