Concept of ‘Individual Candidate Record Isolation’ in Voting

Abstract

This paper explores the challenges faced by global voting technology developers and voting equipment manufacturers. Traditional voting systems, including Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and paper-based voting, present significant security, transparency, and accessibility issues. The author presents an Indigenous Voting System (IVS) which provides a secure voting mechanism to address these challenges. The concept of IVS is based on Individual Candidate Record isolation (ICRI). The concept of ICRI in the voting records has been implicitly implemented and used in different forms without mentioning this terminology in the literature. This is the first paper to use the terminology of ICRI in voting. In this paper, the author discusses types, impact and recommendation of ICRI and presents a theoretical discussion, based on historical and current voting systems to bring out the various implicit aspects of ICRI. Further, this paper identifies the subtypes of Individual Candidate Record Isolation (ICRI) and categorizes them into No ICRI (NICRI), True ICRI (TICRI), and Virtual ICRI (VICRI), providing comparative analysis. It is seen that IVS proposed by the author is a TICRI-based voting system. This paper compares IVS with existing systems, focusing on its impact on the voting industry and its TICRI (True Individual Candidate Record Isolation) features. At last the challenges towards ICRI for voting equipment industry are discussed, with recommendations.