The research was part of the PhD for University of Basque Country (UPV/EHU) researcher, Maider Huarte Arrayago.
Huarte started her PhD research with the analysis of systems for electronic voting by Internet. As a result of this analysis, she observed that the current systems for electronic voting by Internet complied with the principles of equality and secrecy.
To this end, in this work, Huarte studied the principles of universal suffrage and liberty, and proposed a number of changes and improvements.
As regards the principles of liberty, the researcher proposed the following objectives: on the one hand, improving reliability in order to boost the voluntary participation of the electors and to achieve better results and, on the other hand, improve flexibility, thus providing electors with a better way of making their opinion known.
As regards universal suffrage, the goals have been twofold: defining a human-machine interface that takes into account the heterogeneity of the capacities of the electors and increasing the mobility of electors without affecting communication protocols.
To achieve these objectives, Huarte put forward a number of solutions.
Regarding liberty, in order to improve reliability, for example, she reinforced robustness, transparency and the lodging of private complaints.
That is, in the system proposed by Huarte, the only thing maintained in secret are the secret passwords to be employed in the protocols.
Likewise, she has drawn up the option for making private complaints without compromising the secret of the ballot box.
A number of measures have also been established to improve flexibility: she defined systems and protocols that do not affect the digital paper-vote format and the count methodology and, moreover, the reader can interrupt the process of casting the vote at any time and start again.
Regarding the aims of universal suffrage, on the other hand, she proposed enhancing the current interfaces and new ones for the future.
After all these provisions and proposals, Huarte concluded that certain characteristics of the principle of liberty were limited by the cryptographic techniques employed on complying with equality and the right to secrecy.
She also observed that, with reference to security, current techniques and tools or their use are not sufficient if the software is not suitably created.