Stakeholder identification :

The Municipal Councils E-voting initiative has been proposed for the public wide participation of citizens. The initiative demands constant improvements and enhancements. Presently, since the system does not support E-voting, changes and serious updates and improvements are required. As a consultant specializing in software development and requirements engineering, you have signed the contract to develop and implement the e-voting system project. Your manager provided you with the following initial facts as reported by the Municipal Council of Jeddah. The National Council responsible for the voting process issued a report, stating that: The e-voting system shall be as easy, practical, and confidential as possible The e-voting system Shall use The Unified National Platform GOV.SA as method to identify induvial. 1 The e-voting system must consider all the regulation and low of municipal councils that issued by royal decree. 2 Citizens who have no access to any internet access technology should under no circumstances be penalized. The electorate should be able to express on municipal issues. The technical infrastructure should be reliable The system should make it possible to verify voting capacity For the voting process a list of legal provisions was created. This document was concerned with the security of the e-voting system, as follows: Only eligible voters may take part in the election Each voter must have a single vote and must vote only once There is no way in which voters cast can be revealed without permission. All voters cast must be counted for. The original idea was to give a wide platform to cast votes for public participation of citizens. The objective of E-voting was not to replace the classical or postal voting, but to serve as an additional channel that might increase voters turnout. In fact, the age group to be interested in e-voting are the young adults (i.e.17-30) who uses the Internet frequently. 1 The University of Jeddah will be involved in commissioning the legal and socio studies , while private companies will be asked to develop some parts of the application, test its security, try to penetrate the system and analyze it. The Saudi Government is the owner of the online E-voting application. In practice, the E-voting process works as follows. All citizens will log in by The Unified National Platform GOV.SA( NAFATH). Then, the voter must fill in an online ballot form like the paper one. The system then displays a recap of his/her choices, allowing him/her to change it. Finally, the voter receives the confirmation of the date and hour when his/her vote was recorded. To avoid the situation where a voter can cast more than one vote, a unique database will be created, to record the voting ID numbers and mark all those that have already been used to vote, irrespective of the channel (postal, Internet, or polling station). The communication between the citizen's computer/gadget and the vote server is protected by the protocol SSL128. The vote server uses a public key infrastructure that is authenticated with a digital certificate. The user can control the authenticity of the server by checking the fingerprint of the certificate. The E-voting system should use two different types of servers: the Internet application server that allows the communication with citizens by means of web pages; this machine uses an Apache web server and a Tomcat application server installed in two different partitions the database server that stores all the information related to the electoral roll and the e-ballot box; this server uses Oracle version 9. Letter from the municipality of Jeddah Dear Sir/Madam, The National Council responsible for the voting process informed us that your company oversees the development of the new E-voting system. I am writing to you to clarify some matters. As you may already know, the existing voting system has not been too popular throughout the last decade, although huge efforts have been put into convincing citizens to use it, especially at the local level, by us, the municipality of Jeddah. People simply do not like it. We understand that the main reason for implementing it is the low participation rate, but maybe such an e-voting system is simply not the right choice. The cost of a wide introduction in all municipalities of this new e-voting system that will allow all citizens to vote online is estimated with an investment between 400 to 600 million SAR. This amount is incredibly high for no reason. Another cost which directly impacts us is the training cost for educating our citizens how to use digital The case study was elaborated for teaching purposes only 3 signatures. How will this improve their quality of life? Most of them are heavy Internet users, but it is estimated that only around 2% use digital signatures. What will we do about the rest of them? Our municipality does not have neither budget nor human resources allocated for that. Moreover, we will by no means create another central electronic standardized register, since we already have one which is good enough. If we truly must implement this new E-voting system, we should at least use what we already have. We are not experts in security, but that should be considered as well, our citizens are rather worried about the potential links between their identity and their votes. Thank you, Mohammad Mayor of Jeddah