Swiss E-Voting Workshop 2010 - a Success

More than 60 persons (including the speakers) attended the Swiss E-Voting Workshop on September 6, 2010, held in Fribourg, Switzerland. The workshop was organized by the Federal Chancellery of Switzerland (H.-U. Wili, A. Driza Maurer, D. Muster), the University of Fribourg (U. Ultes-Nitsche), and the Bern University of Applied Sciences (R. Haenni, E. Dubuis). Six renowned speakers from abroad (P. Ryan, Luxembourg; O. Pereira, Belgium; M. Clarkson, USA; H. Lipmaa, Estonia; C. Bull, Norway; and J. Puiggali, Spain) had interesting and instructive speeches about the state-of-the-art e-voting systems. For example, the speeches of Ryan, Pereira and Clarkson told clearly that transparency can be achieved thanks of the end-to-end verifiability of votes for the voters. The talk of S. Fischli and O. Spycher on a transparent e-voting system for Baloti, a platform for immigrants of Switzerland, showed how transparency can be achieved in practice.

One third of the participants originate from abroad, a fact that we are very pleased of. Especially worth mentioning is the presence of a delegation from the USA which not only attended the workshop, but was the reason of running another, informal meeting on Tuesday, September 7. The participants on that meeting were, besides the Americans, the speakers, some members of the organization committee, and some other e-voting experts from Switzerland.

The workshop (and the informal meeting) were a success from the organizational point of view, too, which was widely confirmed via the participants' evaluations.