ABSTRACT
Communication plays a crucial role in business, education, and generally in everyday people's interactions. Face-to-face communication has been banned by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and had to be replaced with its electronic remote form. Popular digital applications allowed us to switch to online life quite easily. That conversion wasn't problematic for most (especially young) people. Working online and meeting people virtually became a standard, and people have mostly adapted to the new reality. Moving conventional communication to the Internet wasn't much challenging, because it was only a matter of existing ICT solutions popularization. They have already existed and were functional, but haven't been used much often. COVID-19 pandemic changed it permanently because there was no other way as rapid adoption to this unusual situation. Although most of the actions could have been realized online, some were more problematic to conduct electronically. One of them was secret balloting for virtual meetings. As open voting was not much complicated to arrange using remote communication, conduction the secret type of elections was not so obvious. In open voting electors' data can be revealed and the results may be easily verified when it's finished. Secret voting demands to remain voters' data and their choices confidential. That leads to the question of how to verify the users' identity and voting rights and keep them anonymous at the same time? This paper provides an overview of a person's remote identification and verification methods, also explores the possibilities of using them for secret voting authentication. Results show that conducting a secret ballot with remote voter authentication is possible. The method was widely described and also applied in a authors' digital system. A fully functional ICT solution has been tested in real elections across several organizations in Poland, in which present authorities were elected electronically during the COVID-19 lockdown period.
ABSTRACT
Two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have pushed society's digitalization forward like nothing ever before. Activities that weren't achievable without personal contact, became present online. Currently, when the COVID-19 restrictions are being lifted and personal meetings are becoming possible, in some cases, it still appeared to be more convenient to "meet" virtually than physically. Some actions proved to be more effective when performed online. That is why some people didn't want to come back to the previous form of communication anymore. Many decision-makers who see all the advantages of online communication have turned to the new possibilities that are served by Internet systems. Hence, they intend to keep it virtual even now, when pandemic restrictions have been lifted in most cases. This situation implies lots of great ideas for virtualization. One of those is online voting and polling conducted on many voters - groups larger than just board members or delegates. Such balloting could be performed using a voting system. Unfortunately, in the case of the decision-making process, which should be treated as a one-time event, using typical solutions is mostly very ineffective. Observations revealed that e-voting procedures conducted on a large number of electors may be challenging for many, not computer-experienced users. The procedure of authentication has to stay present in order to protect the votings against ballot stuffing. Particularly in secret voting, the problem remains the same: how to verify the user for a secret ballot without revealing his data. In mass voting, additional issues appear such as how to complete the procedure on multiple (often not ICT-experienced) voters and how to make the system accessible and credible at the same time.