A secure e-voting system for the 2025 CSA election
26.07.2024 – Eric Dubuis
Many countries are using the UniVote e-voting system for the 2025 election to the Council of the Swiss Abroad. How secure and verifiable is its voting process? Professor Eric Dubuis, an e-voting expert, shares some insights on the complex subject.
UniVote is a modern e-voting system that is secure, transparent and verifiable. It was developed in 2017 to ensure a secure and transparent procedure for electronic votes and elections – such as the election of the Council of the Swiss Abroad members. To that end, UniVote uses advanced cryptographic techniques and a dispersed infrastructure.
The votes posted by the voters are encrypted directly in their browser. That way no unencrypted data is transferred to UniVote. When the election is over, the encrypted votes are mixed up by UniVote via a cryptographic process, without their having to be encrypted in advance. This mixing ensures the votes cannot be connected with the identities of the voters. It is also possible to check that the process was performed correctly in accordance with voting secrecy requirements.
Eric Dubuis at the March 2024 exchange with CSA delegates at the Federal Palace. Photo: Marc Lettau
At the start of the voting process, Univote generates a pair of keys, consisting of a private and an anonymous public key. This is done via a personal identification number (PIN) entered in the browser by the eligible voter. The private key stays with the voter while the public key is used anonymously in the system to validate the vote and ensure the integrity of the process. UniVote uses a decentralised infrastructure whereby different independent components distribute the tasks among themselves according to the rules of an e-voting protocol.
At the end of this process, no component can determine which vote comes from which person. After the mixing, the components jointly decrypt the votes and publish the result on the UniVote public bulletin board. The bulletin board is a transparent platform where all the important information on verifying the voting process is displayed. Voters and independent auditors can review the entire voting process there. That includes both reviewing all the votes cast and allowing every eligible voter to confirm that their vote was correctly registered and counted.
UniVote ensures via these confidence-building measures that the entire voting process is transparent, secure and verifiable. The system enables voters to place their vote in an electronically secure manner, in the knowledge that the process conforms to exacting data protection and security standards.
About the author
Eric Dubuis is an established e-voting expert. In his more than 30 years at Bern University of Applied Sciences, his main interest was in cybersecurity and verifiable e-voting systems. Eric Dubuis is also a founding member of the Swiss E-Voting Competence Center.
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