e-Poll™ main goal: reduce your elections costs

The e-Poll™ is a product that allows votes to be cast through a website (remotely) or through a local web application with internet access (voting 'locally' remotely).

The main objective achieved by using our product is that it enables you to reduce both the direct and indirect costs associated with organising an election.

Organising an election is not only expensive, but in its paper form has numerous disadvantages (which themselves are potential sources of costs to the organiser):

  • the cumbersome nature of organising and running paper-based elections (invitations, voting slips, managing ballot boxes, manual counting, etc). This involves direct costs: printing hard copy documents, mail-outs, invitations, voting slips ;
  • within organisations, the working time of many people is monopolised from the preparation stage (printing voting slips, for example) until after the election (calculations, analysis, report writing, etc). This involves personnel costs.

 Both in compulsory elections and free elections, there is a risk that abstentions will threaten the credibility of the result of the vote, leading to disputes, recounts, and potential second rounds; all of this as a whole generates costs for the election organiser.

 The advantages of our solution

From the point of view of the election organiser

  • A direct reduction in the costs of the election ;
  • Configuring an election once, then executing it several times. This also allows the organiser to organise elections more quickly and more frequently ;
  • A voting solution for geographically distant voters. This also favours a higher level of participation in the elections ;
  • Faster vote counting, calculation and publication of the results, with the option of having them displayed online, with either open or controlled access.

From the point of view of the voters

  • Easy to vote, simply via a web page ;
  • Option of remote voting, from home or while travelling abroad. No need to leave the workstation ;
  • An additional way of voting other than paper vote ;
  • Better guarantees and trust in the reliability of the results.

Technically the product guarantees the following features

Integrity

Our voting system complies with the integrity criterion, defined as: "ensuring that the vote cast is correctly included when calculating the result".

The system ensures that:

  • a person who is not registered as a voter cannot vote ;
  • a person who has already voted cannot vote a second time in the same election (although the voting process enables several votes to be cast, only one of these will be counted, for example the last vote cast before the deadline);
  • a person entitled to vote for a given area (for example a district, province, etc) can only vote for this area.

Anonymity and confidentiality

  • anonymity: protecting personal data in such a way that no link can be made between who has voted and for whom they have voted. This anonymity is built into the system to be applied to all stages of an election.
  • confidentiality: protecting election data before, during and after the analysis. All the data are encrypted. No results, even partial results, can be extracted from the ballot boxes without bringing together several keys shared between several people. This prevents fraud, pressure on an individual to obtain information, or any manipulation of the results.

Authentication of the voter

By definition a voter must be authenticated before proceeding to vote. Typically our system, which uses eID card authentication, is the perfect method for doing this. We also support all other authentication mechanisms, be they other chip cards or voting keys given to the voters.

Personal data are not kept

The voting data are obviously stored in encrypted form during the elections, and to enable the results to be calculated after the election. Since the authentication and voting functions are completely separate from one another, no personal data are kept.

Non-repudiation

The system is designed to enable the voting process to be verified transparently, including by the voter. The cryptographic mechanisms put in place allow one-off verifications or even a total recount if required.

To find out more about this product, or to request a specific study of your situation, contact us here.