| In the past, suffrage was a privilege limited to a small subset of US citizens. Today, thanks to Civil Rights activists and suffragettes, all eligible citizens may participate in the electoral process, provided they have reached their eighteenth birthday. Voting systems have evolved over the years. While their main purpose was to provide ease and comfort to the voters, many incidents showed that this was not the result. In 2002, the Help America Vote Act's (HAVA) multibillion-dollar budget facilitated the transition towards electronic voting machines in many states. This transition resulted in many unanticipated outcomes, and serious concerns regarding the integrity of the electoral process arose. This is mainly due to the conflict between the electoral process requirements. The objective behind maintaining the anonymity of a voter's selection exists to prevent coercion and vote selling. Unfortunately, with many of the current voting schemes enforcing this requirement leaves the voter with no guarantee that his vote made it into the final tally. In this research, we will discuss in detail a variety of previously and currently used election systems and analyze their accuracy and security. We will propose a new voting system that we believe will be able to solve many of the existing problems present in current voting systems. Our system aims to combine the advantages of both conventional and electronic voting systems. Additionally, we will evaluate the possibility of integrating biometrics within the electoral system. |
