E-voting: a scalable approach using XML and hardware security modules

E-voting increasingly gains interest in e-democracy and e-government movements. Not only the security and the availability of electronic election systems are of paramount importance, but also the scalability is of major interest. Especially the fact that in political elections the system has to scale nation-wide, thus having several millions of users, is to be considered. In this paper we state the difficulties and the requirements for a practical implementation of an e-voting system. Both security aspects and scalability issues are addressed. Therefore, the paper introduces a novel approach of building an e-voting system: a system is proposed that addresses one of the main problems in e-voting systems - preserving the voter´s decision an inviolable secret even though strong authentication of the voter is needed y introducing a specific hardware security module into the counting process. The proposed system scales well to large populations. XML is used as a basic technology, which also fits the ongoing e-voting standardization initiatives such as the election markup language (EML). The paper outlines how this approach fits ongoing international standardization initiatives, such as the upcoming Council of Europe recommendations on e-enabled elections.