British Journal of Science 40 September 2011, Vol. 1 (2) © 2011 British Journals ISSN 2047-3745 A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF GENERIC CRYPTOGRAPHIC MODELS FOR SECURE ELECTRONIC VOTING Okediran O. O. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, P.M. B. 4000, Ogbomoso, Nigeria Omidiora E. O. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, P.M. B. 4000, Ogbomoso, Nigeria Olabiyisi S. O. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, P.M. B. 4000, Ogbomoso, Nigeria Ganiyu R. A. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, P.M. B. 4000, Ogbomoso, Nigeria ABSTRACT Electronic voting has been attracting considerable attention during the last years. The interest in e- voting is based on one hand upon interest and attention devoted to e-government, e-democracy, e- governance, etc. On the other hand, interest in e-voting is founded in problems with domestic election systems, e.g. violence, intimidation, ballot stuffing, under-age and multiple voting, counting error, complicity of the security agencies and the absence or late arrival of election materials lacking e.t.c. However, without appropriate security measures, electronic based elections can be a challenge. This paper reviews four generic cryptographic models that were proposed in the academic literature for secure electronic voting and provides a comparison amongst the four models in terms of their core properties of universal verifiability, support for write-in ballot, efficient voting, efficient tallying and large scale election support. KEYWORDS: e-voting, election, homomorphic model, mix-net model, blind signature model, verifiable secret sharing model 1. INTRODUCTION Elections allow the populace 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