A Trustworthy Electronic Voting System for Australian Federal Elections

Abstract: The existing system for determining election results in Australia is, for the most part, secure, accurate and understandable by the average voter. This thesis explores the design of electronic voting systems designed to achieve these same goals, while also improving on the existing system in the areas of counting speed, accuracy, tamper resistance and accessibility. Electronic voting systems have seen limited use within Australian elections, most prominently for State Elections in Victoria (2014), New South Wales (2015) and Western Australia (2017), along with trials of electronic voting systems in federal elections in 2007. This thesis presents an analysis of the iVote electronic voting system used for the 2017 Western Australian State Election (iVote WA), outlining a number of security risks introduced by the use of cloud-based distributed denial of service mitigation. In addition, this thesis presents the results of a cross-sectional survey of Australian voters regarding levels of trust for three voting systems: the existing paper-based system used for Australian federal elections, the iVote WA system, and the vVote system used for the 2014 Victorian State Election. The analysis of iVote, combined with the survey results, are used to inform a recommendation for future research and public policy regarding the use of electronic voting systems in Australian federal elections.