With the rapid growth of e-government, there has been a strong push for online elections. However, voting over the Internet has numerous pitfalls that threaten the democratic process. One of the concerns is the lack of suitable cryptographic protocols for conducting online elections. Many interesting protocols have been proposed but none of them satisfy all the desirable properties for conducting large-scale democratic elections.

In this talk, I give an overview of the current state of research. I discuss the different approaches to constructing election schemes and the challenges we face.