The aim of this project was to investigate commercial applications of self-enforcing e-voting (SEEV). This was conducted for two types of e-voting systems. The first type is internet voting. A prototype of an Internet-based self-enforcing e-voting system, based on the DRE-i protocol (developed in the ERC starting grant project), had been built and applied in the campus of Newcastle University for classroom voting and student prize competitions with very positive student feedback. In this voting system, students use their own mobile phones to cast votes with the ability to verify the integrity of the tallying process. The tallying results are instantly available with publicly verifiable audit data once the election is closed. Based on trials with real users, the system was found to be reliable and usable. A paper entitled "verifiable classroom voting in practice" that summarizes the results has been accepted by IEEE Security & Privacy (2017). This paper shows, for the first time, that fully verifiable voting through the Internet and using mobile phones is feasible for daily routine activities such as classroom voting. Commercial applications of this voting system have been explored for the party chamber voting within the local councils in the UK, the parliamentary voting, and student union elections. The system prototype is currently undergoing refinements, and it is expected that it will be publicly available in 2018.
The second type of voting systems investigated in this project is polling station voting. It has been identified that there are ample commercialization opportunities in this area since the (touch-screen or push button) DRE machines have been widely used in many countries including USA, Brazil and India. Almost all of the DRE machines currently in use are unverifiable, and there exists a strong demand for verifiable voting systems for polling station voting. A new self-enforcing e-voting, called DRE-ip, has been designed specifically for the polling station voting context (another major output from the main ERC grant). This new SEEV system ensures full verifiability for an DRE-based voting system while providing strong guarantee on the ballot secrecy. In this ERC PoC project, we mainly focused on protecting the IPR of this invention and exploring commercial use. A UK patent on DRE-ip has been filed and a US patent is pending. A prototype of this system has been developing using touch-screen Android tablets as the voting clients and a web server in the back-end, and successfully applied in a campus trial in Newcastle University with positive feedback from participants. Contacts have been made with the local councils with the plan to trial the new e-voting system in the exit-polls during the local elections in May 2018.
Overall, results from the ERC PoC project confirm the practical feasibility of the self-enforcing e-voting systems for both internet and polling station voting. Thanks to the project, appropriate IPR has been identified and protected accordingly, which lays a solid foundation for commercialization. Further funding is being sought to develop the business exploitation based on the SEEV technology and its IPR.
