An electronic voting system that's claimed to be secure enough to withstand cyber attacks has been built by researchers at the University of Birmingham.
Professor Mark Ryan and his team say the system can fend off hackers from foreign countries that may try to rig an online election.
While this week's general election will record votes at polling stations and by post, Ryan believes e-voting could be introduced as early as 2020, with his Du-Vote system making it more secure.
Du-Vote works, he said, because of its simplicity: users are given a credit card-sized device similar to those used in online banking, on which they receive a voter code to type into their computer, tablet or smartphone.
"The main advantage of this system is that it splits the security between the independent security device and a voter's computer or mobile device," Ryan said.
"A computer is a hugely powerful, all-purpose machine running billions of lines of code that no one really understands, whereas the independent security device has a much, much smaller code base and is not susceptible to viruses."
The university team worked on the system for two years, and believe it offers an answer to sceptics who claim e-voting will be too susceptible to hackers.
Team member Gurchetan Grewal said: "This is currently the only piece of work that addresses a core problem of e-voting namely, that someone may have viruses or other malware on their computer."
Around 32 per cent of PCs are infected with malware around the world, according to a 2013 report from Panda Security.
Grewal also cited Estonia's e-voting system, saying it fails to deal with hard-to-detect viruses designed to alter votes and corrupt ballots.
After running tests on their system, the team claims that even if a hostile adversary controls the entire computing infrastructure, voters and election officials would still be able to detect electoral fraud.
However, other issues including family pressure to vote a certain way, would remain despite any sophisticated system designed to thwart hackers.
Read IT Pro's analysis of the prospect of e-voting here.
