Elections allow the people to choose their representatives and express their preferences for how they will be governed. Naturally, the integrity of the election process is fundamental to the integrity of democracy itself. The election system must be sufficiently robust to withstand a variety of fraudulent behaviors and must be sufficiently transparent and comprehensible that voters and candidates can accept the results of an election. Unsurprisingly, history is littered with examples of elections being manipulated in order to nuence their out come. The design of a “good” voting system,whether electronic or using traditional paper ballots
or mechanical devices, must satisfy a number of sometimes competing criteria. The anonymity of a voter’s ballot must be preserved,both to guarantee the voter’s safety when voting against a malevolent candidate, and to guarantee that voters have no evidence that proves which candidates received their votes. The existence of such evidence would allow votes to be purchased by a candidate.
