social

Social Elections

A social election is a special period in the life of your company. We will accompany you in the organisation of this ballot with an easy solution, OAdeo, in full respect of the legislation.

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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

All the answers to all the questions you may have on the OAdeo e-Voting Solution.

Before starting to answer, it is important to precisely define the anonymity notions linked to a voting process.

  • The voter’s anonymity: nobody knows who voted
  • The voting form anonymity: nobody knows to whom the form belongs

Anonymity of the voter
It is essential to determine whether the list of voters will be public, private or impossible to produce. Various techniques allow creating this type of anonymity. OAdeo proposes a whole set of solutions to meet the specific voting rules of an election.

Anonymity of the voting form
This is the issue addressed by the question “is the vote anonymous?”. Indeed, in a paper ballot, the anonymity of the envelope containing the form (inserted in the ballot) is the guarantee of the confidentiality.

In the case of a computer based election, the anonymity is achieved if nobody “watches” while the system is working. It means that the organisers and system designers must be trusted by you. Moreover they must make sure that they will not “break the confidentiality” when they connect on the servers or look at the logs.

The anonymity of the form as a basis of the confidentiality for electronic ballot is obviously a little satisfying solution. With OAdeo, the anonymity of the forms is not necessary. As confidentiality is reached thanks to inalienable and verifiable mathematical principles: you do not need to trust us! The confidentiality of the election is complete even if we connect on the servers or if we look at the system logs.

No, it is not. The organiser is free to authorize revote or not, depending on the rules in force. Revote allows limiting coercion during the election. It also simplifies support to voters (in case of doubt, you can do it again). Of course, the last submitted form is the one taken into account when counting of votes.

The organisers and voters’ concern about revote comes from a misinterpretation (linked to paper election) of the notions of anonymity and confidentiality. In the case of OAdeo, the possibility to revote implies that the forms are not anonymous, but this does not jeopardize the confidentiality of the ballot. For more information, please read previous faq “Is the voting process anonymous?”.

Yes, it is. Before, during and even after the electronic election.

We use different encryption techniques depending on the type of election. All the encrypting operations are verifiable. The two most usually used counting mechanisms are homomorphic addition and mixnet mixing.

Yes, of course. Before, during or after the electronic election. These statistics may be public or have a restricted access. BlueKrypt will see to it that the elements used in the statistics cannot have any impact on the confidentiality of the ballot.

The application source code allowing the voters to build their own voting form is open source.

In this way, the validation of the application source code is a guarantee at the verification step (T), but it does not allow proper certification of the code working at another moment (T+1). In order to solve this problem, OAdeo uses verifiable encryption technologies that allow mathematically validating the whole ballot without needing the application source code.

Yes, naturally. Please contact us for more information.

OAdeo has a clear and easy voting interface. The aim is to ease the casting of a vote and reduce the stress due to the use of computers. The technical complexity is not visible to the voters (and the organisers).

No, they have not. Each key bearer performs his deciphering operation individually. This operation does not give any information, whatever it may be, on the final result of the election.

Yes, it is if your infrastructure is compatible with the specifications of the solution.

At the end of the election, a whole set of mathematical proofs allow completely validating the voting process without any impact on the confidentiality of the voting forms.

Audit process

The audit does not need access to the application source code (although the code allowing the generation of the voting forms is available) nor to the election keys (they are destroyed at the end of the voting process).

BlueKrypt will carry out this validation (audit) at the end of the election. It could then be repeated completely by anyone worldwide. Voters are free to perform the audit by themselves or to trust a person or institution of their choice.

BlueKrypt uses its own infrastructure, hosted in a datacentre in a restrictive and private zone for our company. The equipment and the network elements belong to BlueKrypt.

OAdeo is born as the commercial version of the Helios voting system as presented at the EVT-WOTE conference [’09] and [’11].