Web-based Internet voting services cannot be provided in a reliable manner where a publicly visible website forms the basis
of interacting with voters and collecting votes, as the service cannot resist a distributed denial of service attack. The
problem is a profound one for all interactive web services, however, an Internet voting session is a well defined and quite
simple interaction and an interactive service similar to web-based voting is proposed. This architecture uses a P2P web cache
as the source of a Java voting applet. The applet interacts with the voter via their web browser to collect a vote. The applet
then uses a common P2P file sharing network to deposit encrypted votes for collection by the electoral returning officer.
The issues of how to authenticate voters and how to provide receipting in such an asynchronous system are described along
with premininary .ndings using a large P2P network established for this purpose. A successful demonstration of this approach
may have implications for other mission critical web services which must collect information.