Security Shortcomings of Electronic Web Based Voting Systems for Universities in Kenya

Abstract

Electronic Voting can deliver free and fair elections as well as ensuring on time release of results. One factor fueling the adoption of e-voting is the access to internet and more so GSM network, by majority of the world population. However, with this adoption of electronic voting around the world, some concern are being raised regarding the process. Technically, it’s hard to achieve availability, integrity and confidentiality which are the pillars of a free and fair elections while using electronic voting. It is because of this issues that the purpose of this research was to examine security shortcomings for existing web based electronic voting frameworks. A mixed research design was used for the study covering both descriptive survey design and content analysis. The target population of the study was 13700 students, 60 student’s council leaders, 64 electoral Officials, 4 dean of student office officer, 6 ICT directorate staff and 29 top management from Catholic University and Kenya College of Accounting University both located in Kenya. Purposive sampling was used to select electoral commission chair, Dean of students while random sampling was used to select 6 management officers, 6 ICT directorate staff, 376 students, 14 electoral officials’ staff and 12 student leaders giving a sample of 420. Data collection Instruments were questioners, interview schedule and observation and the data collected was analyzed using descriptive analysis. It was established from the study that the university voting system of the sampled had issues with availability as they had failed at some point. Also, the systems experienced slow speed on the voting day. Another outcome was that the system had locked out a group of eligible voters. Therefore, the systems had issues with integrity. Finally, it was established that the voting system had not allowed non eligible people to vote as well as the system can link the voter and the voter’s ballot which is a confidentiality security concern. The output of the paper is a framework for solvingthe current security issues of the electronic voting web based system for Kenyan universities. The findings of the study are significant to electoral commissions of different institution, voters and policy makers