E-voting is a relatively new concept developed to complement the traditional methods of voting, notably polling stations and voting by postal mail. There are several e-voting solutions on the market which cover a broad range of systems from electronic ballot reading devices, to electronic ballot boxes installed in polling stations, activated by buttons or touch screens, mobile phone voting systems and remote voting via the Internet.
E-Voting in the Canton of Geneva
For the State of Geneva, an e-voting system was introduced by the Chancellor of the State of Geneva in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard and WISeKey. This public-private sector partnership developed a solution compatible with the Swiss voting habits and legal constraints. WISeKey played a crucial role in security of the e-voting system to guarantee the secrecy of voting and to make sure that votes are not intercepted, modified, nor diverted, and to ensure that many other conditions of secrecy were fulfilled. The success of the e-voting project in Geneva, prompted the Swiss Federal Government to continue this experiment at the federal level.
This e-voting approach can also be implemented in other areas, such as online voting for reality TV, which would be part of the new strategy to merge content with transaction capabilities. This way, a secure identity and voting infrastructure could be leveraged to enable advertising targeted around an individual’s profile through a community portal of the reality TV program (e.g. American Idol).