Allowing continuous evaluation of citizen opinions through social networks

Implementing concepts like e-governance and e-democracy requires to effectively allow the continuous participation of citizens in decisional processes of the community. In this context, a crucial aspect is the possibility of receiving the opinion of citizens in several situations. To do this, a massive adoption of existing e-voting systems is in fact unfeasible, but the guarantee that the basic security features are supported, is anyway necessary. In this paper, we propose a lightweight e-voting system relying on existing social networks which appears promising for the above applications. Indeed, our proposal solves the trade-off between security and complexity arising from the scenario of continuous opinion evaluation. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.