Helios Voting

State of Helios at EVT/WOTE 2010

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:51:11 +0000

Tonight, we (Olivier Pereira and Ben Adida) gave a quick talk at the EVT/WOTE conference on the State of Helios. The slides are available: State of Helios 2010 [PDF]. Olivier’s progress using Helios as a platform for new voting initiatives at UCL has been fantastic. On the adoption front, we’ve calculated that more than 25,000 votes have been cast using the Helios Voting platform. The International Association for Crypto Research (IACR) is considering using Helios for its board elections, and we hope other professional associations will follow suit, since Helios may well be the ideal tool.

So, many fun things this past year for Helios, and we hope many more to come this year!

Helios v3 released

benadida — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 06:02:41 +0000

After much development, re-development, and a number of test deployments, Helios v3 is out. Go create an election and vote! The code is up at github, as always. Big features in this new version:

log in with your google, yahoo, twitter, or facebook account
tweet or fb-status-update your vote
significantly streamlined administration, including ease of making Helios the election trustee
upload hundreds of voters at once to your registration list, or
have open registration so anyone can vote
vote even if your browser doesn’t support Java
streamlined voting booth
and many other small improvements

Please enter any bugs you find in our online bug tracker, and enjoy!

Helios deployed at Princeton

benadida — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:59:54 +0000

Helios v3 will be used to run the Princeton Undergraduate Student Government election this month. Read more about it, watch the detailed videos on the Princeton Government blog:

The ability to track your ballot is one of the most important functions Helios gives you as a voter. At any time, during or after the election, you can track your ballot. Find your ballot tracking number (if it didn’t wash off your hand). Then go back to the initial page for the election you want to track your vote in. Click on the “Audit Info” link in the yellow/beige rectangle. Then click “Ballot Tracking Center.” The page will now show a list of all cast ballots. Use the “Find” function of your browser to find your NetID on the page — it’s usually Control-F on PC or Command-F on macs. Next to your NetID, confirm that the tracking number you see there is the one you recorded. Congratulations! You’ve tracked your ballot!

Princeton one step closer to using Helios

benadida — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:05:26 +0000

The Princeton Undergrad Government is one step closer to using Helios for its Fall election. There are still issues to work out, of course, but Helios looks quite compatible with the student government’s goals:

So after all of our work, we now have an implementation of Helios that successfully authenticates voters using CAS, the netID interface, and successfully verifies voter eligibility using the LDAP public directory.

The Princeton folks put together a great screencast about their use of Helios.

Vowee launched

benadida — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:18:56 +0000

Based on Helios v3.0, Votwee just launched. Votwee lets you create an election and vote with your Twitter account. Your encrypted receipts is automatically sent to your Twitter feed so that there is a public, replicated record of your vote.

The UCL deployment of Helios wins Best Paper at EVT/WOTE 2009

benadida — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:00:56 +0000

We (Ben Adida, Olivier de Marneffe, Olivier Pereira, Jean-Jacques Quisquater) are excited that our paper describing the UCL deployment of Helios just received “Best Paper” award at EVT/WOTE 2009. It’s quite exciting to have an open-audit voting system recognized at a conference that is not entirely focused on cryptography!

Update on Helios

benadida — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:46:09 +0000

This blog hasn’t been maintained for the last few months, but much Helios stuff has happened.

Helios was deployed at the Université catholique de Louvain [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. The resulting paper will be presented next week at EVT/WOTE, a workshop held jointly with Usenix Security.

Helios was presented at CodeCon 2009.

Helios was presented at an important Israeli workshop on elections, then featured in the Israeli Press.

Just this week, Princeton indicated that it is considering Helios for its undergraduate elections.

And there’s more news coming on Helios, next week at EVT/WOTE. See you in Montreal if you’re going, otherwise keep your eyes on this blog.

Helios featured on Salon.com

benadida — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:50:46 +0000

Cyrus Farivar does a great job of covering the topic of crypto voting, and not just because he mentions Helios:

One of the strange things about E2E verifiable voting is that it involves cryptography — usually something used to keep things more secret — as a tool to make voting more open and more secure. (Weird, I know.)

Bulk Voter Upload & Multi-Answer Questions

benadida — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:59:44 +0000

Another update pushed to the Helios server today, with two important enhancements:

You can bulk upload voters using comma-separated values (basically Excel.) Currently, the Google App Engine timing limitation means you probably want to bulk upload in chunks of 40 or less, but still much better than one at a time.

You can now specify that a question accepts more than one possible answer. Very useful for letting voters select 2 out 7 board members, for example. The crypto proofs are all updated to take into account this enhancement.

Information Card Foundation using Helios

benadida — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:15:34 +0000

The Information Card Foundation is using Helios for its board election. Perfect use case: 50 people who will likely never all meet in person, but who need to vote on some issues. Helios provides them with a feature they literally could not achieve otherwise today: a secret ballot combined with real end-user verifiability that all votes were correctly captured and counted.

All of this practical interest is bringing up a few interesting needs, like a small widget you can post to your page that provides the status of the election and eventually the results. Fun things to think about.