Computer Scientists Deploy First Practical, Web-based Secure, Verifiable Voting System

Cambridge, Mass. March 5, 2009 - Computer scientists affiliated with the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS), based at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with scientists at the Universitï¿oe Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium, deployed the first practical, web-based implementation of a secure, verifiable voting system for the presidential election held at UCL earlier this week. Called Helios (http://www.heliosvoting.org/) , the system was developed by Ben Adida, a fellow at CRCS and an instructor/researcher at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Harvard Medical School. Professors Jean-Jacques Quisquater and Olivier Pereira and Ph.D. student Olivier de Marneffe at UCL worked closely with the UCL Election Commission to integrate Helios into the University's infrastructure, implement UCL's custom weighted tallying system, and optimize the verification tools for the election size. "Helios allows any participant to verify that their ballot was correctly captured, and any observer to verify that all captured ballots were correctly tallied," said Adida. "We call this open-audit voting because the complete auditing process is now available to any observer.