an open-audit voting system for GNOME elections

[Ben Adida <ben adida net>]

Hi all,

My name is Ben Adida, I'm a postdoc fellow at Harvard working on crypto
and public policy. I spend a bunch of my time on voting systems, in
particular those that let you or anyone audit the process from end to
end. If you haven't encountered these systems before, they're
significantly more powerful than your average voting system, with or
without a "paper trail."

I'm currently implementing Helios, a voting system with this open-audit
property. Last week, I was on the GNOME MC irc, where I collected
requirements for the GNOME election and explained Helios in a bit more
detail. If the system is eventually good enough, the goal is to have
GNOME and potentially other free software groups use it in elections and
referenda.

I've started a publicly accessible and CC-licensed wiki:

http://helios.stikipad.com/

I will keep this wiki updated with the full design and, more
importantly, pointers to partial demos as they become stable enough. Of
course the whole codebase will be free/open-source: I will move it to a
public source repository as soon as it's in decent v0.1 shape (2-3 months).

Your thoughts/comments/questions/criticisms are welcome, either on the
wiki as public comment, or to me personally.


-Ben Adida
ben adida net / ben eecs harvard edu
http://ben.adida.net
http://benlog.com