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E-voting in Jordan: Assessing readiness and developing a system
Emran Aljarrah
a
,
1
, Hamzah Elrehail
a
,
*
,
2
, Bashar Aababneh
b
,
3
a
Girne American University, North Cyprus, Cyprus
b
Eradeh Est., Amman, Jordan
article info
Article history:
Received 10 April 2016
Received in revised form
16 May 2016
Accepted 26 May 2016
Keywords:
E-voting
Jordan
Readiness
Government
M-government
abstract
The aim of this paper to outline the E-voting system readiness and design in Jordan, the researcher’s
illustrate the guideline for developing and designing E-voting system in Jordan election. Moreover the
paper used TAM model to test the Acceptance of the proposed system from voter’s perspective and the
readiness of the system to be used.
©2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................... 860
2. E-voting system in practice: scanning the landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................... 861
2.1. Electronic voting in USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..........................................862
2.2. Electronic voting in Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..........................................862
3. Theoretical foundations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................... 862
3.1. Technology acceptance model (TAM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..........................................862
3.2. Diffusion of Innovation theory (DOI) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..........................................863
3.3. Webtrustmodel .......................................................... ..................................................863
4. Research design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................... 863
4.1. Readiness conceptual model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..........................................865
5. System development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......... .............. 865
5.1. The Rapid Application Development (RAD) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......................................865
5.2. Proposed e voting system framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..........................................865
5.3. The entity-relational model of E-voting system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......................................866
6. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....................... 866
References.................................................................... . ....................................................867
1. Introduction
Governments in many countries around the world try to utilize
the information and communication technologies to transform
traditional government services to electronic government or digital
government. In Jordan, The government has started implementing
a program of an e-Government in 2002, which aims to improve its
*Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: cshamzah@gmail.com (E. Aljarrah), cs-hamzah@hotmail.com
(H. Elrehail), Bashar4real@hotmail.com (B. Aababneh).
1
He is doing PhD in Management Information System, his research focus on
system design and readiness.
2
He is doing PhD In Business Management. His research area Innovation,
Leadership, Knowledge Management and MIS in general.
3
His Research interests include innovation and entrepreneurship through tech-
nological advancements.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Computers in Human Behavior
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.076
0747-5632/©2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016) 860e867
service delivery and increase the involvement of citizens through
the penetration of technology. A voting system which is one of the
significant services which has been conducted and controlled by a
government still very old, which can call legacy systems.
The current traditional “paper-based”voting system which has
been used in Jordan is encountering many problems and compli-
cations which we will present major of them later. However, the
successive governments have tried to conduct the democratic ap-
proaches through several practices which have been executed to
improve the variety of life aspects (Ilieva, 2011), but with the rapid
advances in information technology and information transfer
speed, it is still the parliamentary election system in Jordan, which
is one of the democratic approaches in Jordan relies on traditional
methods of implementation.
In Jordan, it undergoes democratic elections periodically. It
holds parliament elections every four years to elect its legislative
body. Municipal elections in Jordan also take place once every four
years to elect the governing boards for the various Jordanian
municipalities.
And often times due to technical limitations, in cases of fraud in
some areas because of the influence of politicians on people. In
addition, unreliability of the performance of the election because of
political money, the results of the voting are not announced until an
audit takes place, or where a re-count is placed in order. Intro-
ducing irregularities in the final count results.
Consequently, it is should be a significant research work to deal
with these problems and complications by building an electronic
voting system (e-voting) which should be able to control the entire
processes of elections.
2. E-voting system in practice: scanning the landscape
Currently, E-voting systems face a number of obstacles to be
overcome before they could be used as a successor to the current
paper-based voting system. A new proposed e-voting system
should match different requirements; functional and non
functional.
According to the recommendation report by election moni-
toring program and the performance of the elected councils in
Jordan (Monitor: December 2015), that said there is a need for a
mechanism to vote through the “house of representatives and
Senate”meeting is better than the current which requires
amendments to the rules of procedure of the Senate so that the
adoption of the electronic voting system means more efficient to
ensure the accuracy of the vote.
The importance and the requirements of the application of an
electronic voting system in elections, whether parliamentary, local
municipality, trade union, chambers of commerce and industry
elections with a statement of applied procedures of this system and
the benefits to be derived by the application of a strategic alter-
native to traditional systems under which the elections are held
(Kohno, Stubblefield, Rubin, &Wallach, 2004), which hovers
around some cast doubt on the integrity, accuracy and validity of
their procedures, decreasing show transparency procedures, pro-
cesses and their results in front of the concerned public opinion.
According to (Alomari, Elrehail, &Al Shibly, 2013) the govern-
ment in Jordan developed SMS gateway that make communication
between government and citizen more effective and easier. Abu-
Shanab et al. (2010) in his study for E-voting conducted in Jordan,
the researcher applied his study in University student voting for
their representative in their departments, the study reveals that
factors influence the convenience and integrity of election process.
Moreover the study tries to emphasize the factors that are adopting
the e-voting system in Jordan University’s.
Moreover about more scenarios in E-voting Pan, Hou, &Ansari
(2013) the researcher focused on three items related to voters
and candidates, are privacy, verification and confidentiality which
are the most important elements in the e-voting election. In addi-
tion Pan et al. (2013) add new security schema which called “RE-
NOTE”for continuous research on E-voting system which used the
previous schema “E-NOTE”, the ring schema allow group of users to
sing massages without information provided about the user
(Voter). Moreover this schema increased the security of E-voting
system using the previous mentioned schema.
According to (Pan, Hou, &Ansari, 2015)“M-NOTE”schema
provide more functionality for voters that can cast and audit their
votes, “M-NOTE”should provide more security that prevent hacker
using clash attacks to access the voters choices, manipulate it.
Kusters, Truderung, &Vogt (2012) in their paper introduce the
term of “Verifiability”which means there is an authority for users
of E-voting system (i.e. Voters) to check the results of voting pro-
cess, is their votes counted, affect the voting results and no
manipulation to their votes happened. Moreover the effect of clash
attack does it affect the results, the ballots changed by new ballots.
The tested systems mentioned by Kusters et al. (2012) are the
“Wombat Voting system”and a variant of the “Helios voting
system”.
The Wombat Voting system its an academic project which try to
make the voting process clear to voters, which provide a clear
process and verifiable to voters, the system developed by “Alon
Rosen”which used a method “cryptographically-based system”
(Wombat Voting system website).
Adida (2008) “Helios voting system”introduce as the first voting
system using web and open-audit system, the most feature is that
any one (i.e. users) can run the election in a simple way, the “Helios”
is suited for small group of voters, prevent any manipulation of
ballots and decrease the authority of open-audit election.
Obviously, through reviewing some of the current electronic
voting systems and even studies on this topic, which tended to the
technical side in solving information security problems, and
through several models to encrypt data to deal with secure infor-
mation, although it is very possible through the availability of data
encryption which is supported by, database servers and Unix
servers.
There are a variety of private and public e-voting applications
available (MotionVoter, 2011). and (Vote-Now n.d.) Offer a private
election service. Source Forge includes a project which promises an
open-source electronic voting system for download (Electronic
Voting System, 2009). Though when the researcher checked, the
project had no files available.
The US Department of Defense’s Federal Voting Assistance
Program (FVAP) proposed an Internet based voting system for the
2004 primary and general elections named Secure Electronic
Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) (D. D. Jefferson, Rubin,
Simons, &Wagner, 2004). The FVAP assembled a Security Peer
Review Group (SPRG) to evaluate SERVE. Their report very strongly
recommended against deploying SERVE and SERVE was withdrawn
from use (Defense, 2007, p 11).
The SPRG report lists many security concerns regarding elec-
tronic voting in general and Internet voting in particular. These
areas of interest include:
PC-centric application versus Server-centric application.
Security of the intermediate network.
Voter-verified audit trail.
Control of the voting environment.
Spoofing and man in the middle attacks.
Denial of service attacks.
The ultimate objective of SERVE is to enable voting from any PC
E. Aljarrah et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016) 860e867 861
from anywhere in the world. I do not expect that to be accom-
plished anytime soon. But, I expect improvements toward that
objective can be made.
2.1. Electronic voting in USA
Initially introduced in 1975, the concept of e-voting would allow
voters to cast their ballots using computer based equipment as
opposed to traditional punch card or paper ballot options. Origi-
nally, the National Bureau of Standards and the Office of the Federal
Elections released a report citing the major problems with e-voting.
The lack of appropriate technical skills to develop and implement
the Standards needed to test the hardware and software and
technical and managerial problems associated with the integrity of
the vote counting process were the primary issues. While skill has
certainly increased, the basic integrity issues still remain.
Between 1984 and 1990, the Federal Election Committee (FEC)
developed, revised, and eventually published the Performance and
Test Standards for Punchcard, Marksense, and Direct Recording Elec-
tronic Voting Systems. This document outlined voluntary, national
standards for computer-based voting systems. Implementation of
the Standards was begun by the National Association of State
Election Directors (NASED) in 1994. They created a process by
which vendors can present their systems to be evaluated against
the hardware and software Standards. Since that time, the equip-
ment of 30 companies has passed the requirements set forth in the
Standards.
Due to ever-changing technology, the FEC has approved re-
visions to the original Standards to stay abreast with those changes.
The primary goal of the Standards has, and continues to be, to
provide a mechanism for state and local election official to assure
the public of the integrity of computer-based election systems.
2.2. Electronic voting in Ireland
The introduction of electronic voting is the biggest change to the
Irish electoral system since the establishment of the state over 80
years ago. The idea was introduced by the Fianna F
ail/PD govern-
ment in 1999 with an Act to allow the use of actual ballot papers for
research into voting methods. In 2000 a public tender was issued
and it was won by the Power vote/Nedap/Groenendaal consortium.
Later in 2001 an amendment to the Electoral Act was passed
allowing the Minister to approve machines for electronic voting.
Remarkably, no objective or legal criteria were set for the machines
or the software.
The first enabling legislation was brought in as part of a broad,
controversial bill. Debate on this bill was guillotined by the Gov-
ernment. Several members voiced their concerns about the system
at the time. They were assured that the introduction of electronic
voting would not go ahead without all-party consensus.
The system was then used in three constituencies in the June
2002 General Election. The Government said the trial was suc-
cessful, but others - including the authors - have grave reservations.
The formal reports from the Returning Officers indicate many faults
occurred [Fit02]. The results were declared without any external
audit of the votes.
Without further consultation, either with the Opposition or
with the public, the Government decided in October 2002 to
implement the system countrywide for the June 2004 local and
European elections.
In 2003 a series of reports [Mcg03, Mcc03] were published
questioning the integrity of the system and the process used to
introduce it. A Parliamentary committee examined the matter, but
on December 18th, 2003, the government parties applied the whip
to close the debate just after the authors raised many technical
questions. A publicity campaign was launched by the Government
in February 2004 costing some V5million.
3. Theoretical foundations
3.1. Technology acceptance model (TAM)
The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been used in
research to explore the acceptance of new e-technology or new e-
services (Davis, 1989; Davis &Venkatesh, 1996). TAM is one of the
most effective contribution of Ajzen and Fishbein’s theory of
reasoned action (TRA). Davis’s technology acceptance model (Davis,
1989; Davis, Bagozzi, &Warshaw, 1989) is the most widely utilized
models of acceptance and usage of innovated technology by users.
A relationship has been found between the beliefs of users about
a technology’s usefulness and the attitude and the intention to use
the technology. A perceived usefulness shows more harmonious
relationship with usage than did other model’s variables. Therefore,
the researcher decides to use PU and PEOU in building new
research model.
Perceived usefulness (PU): Is defined as the degree to which a
user believes that using a specific system would enhance the job
performance.
Perceived ease-of-use (PEOU) - Is defined as the degree to which
a user believes that using a particular system would be effort-free.
Fig. 1. Technology acceptance model.
E. Aljarrah et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016) 860e867862
3.2. Diffusion of Innovation theory (DOI)
Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory describes a model which is
used in IS research to explain user’s adoption of new technology,
Rogers’Everett (1995). Rogers defines diffusion as ‘the process by
which an innovation is communicated through certain channels
over time amongst the members of a social society’(Rogers Everett,
1995). An innovation represents an idea or an object that is
perceived to be new (Rogers Everett, 1995).
According to this theory, the diffusion rate is affected by a
relative advantage of an innovation, complexity, compatibility,
trial-ability and observability.
Relative advantage was defined as the degree to which an
innovation is seen as being better than its predecessor. Compati-
bility refers to the degree to which the new innovation is
compatible with existing values, beliefs and needs of adopters
(Rogers Everett, 1995).
3.3. Web trust model
Trust in the government and the internet. The E-voting system is
an e-government initiative that requires a trust to facilitate adop-
tion. The effective diffusion of e-voting in Jordan requires voter’s
confidence in the interest, integrity, and competence of e-voting
service providers, like the government officials, politicians, legis-
lators, and systems developers that enable and implement e-voting
services (Mayer, Davis, &Schoorman, 1995). Internet voting adop-
tion is dependent upon voters trust in both the government and the
technology that enables e-voting services such as internet (Carter
and B
elanger, 2005; Lee &Turban, 2001).
4. Research design
Research design reported here provides a guideline for action
for investigating E-voting in Jordan. The objectives of the study are
determined which leads the research question formulation. To
Fig. 2. Research procedures.
E. Aljarrah et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016) 860e867 863
Fig. 3. Conceptual research model.
Fig. 4. Rapid Application Development (RAD) life cycle.
E. Aljarrah et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016) 860e867864
ensure that the information collected is appropriate for solving the
problem, the researcher also must determine the e-voting readi-
ness questionnaire, the sampling methodology, and the schedule.
This section covers research questions, hypotheses and data
collection and analysis for answering them. The research proposed
here employs a positivist method that is explained by a deductive
approach to research. Hence, the starting point is a theory that is
developed into testable theoretical propositions using empirical
data. Once the readiness is assessed the researcher will start
developing a prototype of a functional system.
4.1. Readiness conceptual model
The research model proposed in Fig. 3 below explains how this
research aims to approach e-voting readiness in Jordan. This
research model employs three theoretical perspectives through
which a theoretical laden understanding is developed. Such
grounding in theoretical foundations makes the research model a
better representation of reality as it exists or as it is perceived to
exist (see Fig. 2).
5. System development
The Design is implemented in this phase. The techniques for
implementation will of course vary depending on the artifact to be
constructed. This project is a web-based system which detailed
requirements and suggestion are already looked into in the previ-
ous stages (see Figs. 4e6).
At this stage, firstly, we should understand the proposed system
behavior by using the use case modeling, which is the best way to
determine the processes flow. As shown in Fig. 1, the general e-
voting processes involve:
- Voter as an actor in the system.
- There are three main processes (Registration, Authentication&
Authorization, Voting and Tallying)
The system will be implemented based on the Rapid Application
Development (RAD) life cycle.
5.1. The Rapid Application Development (RAD)
RAD (Fig. 3) is a development lifecycle designed to give much
faster development and higher-quality results than those achieved
with the traditional lifecycle. It is designed to take the maximum
advantage of powerful development software that has evolved
recently.
5.2. Proposed e voting system framework
As illustrated in Fig. 3, the voter can login to the system by
several way, using his/her appropriate and available
Fig. 5. The general framework of our proposed e-voting system.
E. Aljarrah et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016) 860e867 865
communication media, voting server which is an application server
with fully supported by Unix as operating system, this server will
connect with Database server to authenticate a user data which are
stored in Database or a warehouse database (Ikonomopoulos,
Lambrinoudakis, Gritzalis, Kokolakis, &Vassiliou, 2002).
Warehouse database should be controlled by a warehouse
management system (WMS), Database server includes Database
Management System (DBMS), The DBMS consists of various func-
tions that provide entry, storage and retrieval of large information
and provides ability to manage information which was organizedin
Database warehouse.
5.3. The entity-relational model of E-voting system
We use commercial package (Smart draw) to build entity rela-
tional model, which consists of six main entity as shown at fig. 3.
$Candidates of type person.
$Voter is of type person.
$Candidate is a weak entity generated from adding a person in a
vote form.
$Voter is a weak entity generated from the person registration in
a vote.
$Candidate may refer to a list or not.
$Candidate List contains one or more candidates.
$Vote has one or more vote forms.
$Vote form has many candidates.
Voter vote is a weak entity depends on the voting process, when
voter votes for a specific candidate in a specific vote form.
6. Conclusion
In this paper researcher tries to outline a conceptual framework
for E-voting system to apply it in Jordan, the paper goes with
literature, then system design to make it more applicable in Jordan.
Moreover the paper discussed the readiness for applying E-voting
system in Jordan Based on TAM model.
The researchers propose a solution to this issue by proposing an
e-voting system for Jordanian elections. In order to so, the research
is of two folds: firstly to study the readiness of the Jordanian voters
for an e-voting system and secondly propose an actual system e-
Fig. 6. ER diagram of E-voting system.
E. Aljarrah et al. / Computers in Human Behavior 63 (2016) 860e867866
voting system development.
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