The November 2014 Australian State of Victoria election was the first statutory political election worldwide at State level which deployed an end-to-end verifiable electronic voting system in polling places. This was the first time blind voters have been able to cast a fully secret ballot in a verifiable way, and the first time a verifiable voting system has been used to collect remote votes in a political election. The code is open source, and the output from the election is verifiable. The system took 1121 votes from these particular groups, an increase on 2010 and with fewer polling places.
Other verifiable systems such as Helios @cite_16 and Wombat @cite_10 have been used for Student Union and other non-political elections, but scaling them up to politically binding elections and hardening them for a more robust environment is challenging, and in their present form they are also not so suitable for elections as complex as those in Victoria. Other electronic elections that have been fielded (such as those recently fielded in Estonia, Norway, Canada, and New South Wales) do not provide end-to-end verifiability. Some of them allow voters to verify some aspect of their vote (for example, that the system has a vote with a particular receipt number) but do not provide verifiability all the way from the vote cast through to the final tally.
@cite_16 @cite_10
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Voting with cryptographic auditing, sometimes called open-audit voting, has remained, for the most part, a theoretical endeavor. In spite of dozens of fascinating protocols and recent ground-breaking advances in the field, there exist only a handful of specialized implementations that few people have experienced directly. As a result, the benefits of cryptographically audited elections have remained elusive. We present Helios, the first web-based, open-audit voting system. Helios is publicly accessible today: anyone can create and run an election, and any willing observer can audit the entire process. Helios is ideal for on-line software communities, local clubs, student government, and other environments where trustworthy, secret-ballot elections are required but coercion is not a serious concern. With Helios, we hope to expose many to the power of open-audit elections. We report on the design and implementation of a new cryptographic voting system, designed to retain the "look and feel" of standard, paper-based voting used in our country Israel while enhancing security with end-to-end verifiability guaranteed by cryptographic voting. Our system is dual ballot and runs two voting processes in parallel: one is electronic while the other is paper-based and similar to the traditional process used in Israel. Consistency between the two processes is enforced by means of a new, specially-tailored paper ballot format. We examined the practicality and usability of our protocol through implementation and field testing in two elections: the first being a student council election with over 2000 voters, the second a political party's election for choosing their leader. We present our findings, some of which were extracted from a survey we conducted during the first election. Overall, voters trusted the system and found it comfortable to use.