Olivier Pereira, Research Associate, Professor, Universite catholique de Louvain, Belgium
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Author Biography Olivier Pereira is a research associate of the F.R.S.-FNRS and a professor at Universite catholique de Louvain, where his research focuses on cryptology and information security. He received a degree in Electrical engineering, a post-graduate diploma in mathematics, and a PhD in cryptology in the same university, in 1998, 1999 and 2003 respectively. In 2009, he organized what appears to be the first significant-outcome, multi-thousand-voter open-audit election. |
| Abstract In March 2009, the Université catholique de Louvain elected its President using a custom deployment of the Helios web-based open-audit voting system. Out of 25,000 potential voters, 5000 registered, and almost 4000 voted in each round of the election. The precision of the voting system turned out to be crucial: in the first round, the leader came short of winning the election by only 2 votes. We will describe the Helios-based voting system used in this election, the specifics of the UCL deployment, and the lessons learned in this deployment. We note at least one interesting conclusion: while it is often assumed that open-audit voting will lead to more complaints and potentially a denial-of-service attack on the auditing process, we found that, instead, complaints are likely to be more easily handled in open-audit elections because evidence and counter-evidence can be presented. This is joint work with Ben Adida and Olivier de Marneffe. |