d-voting

d-voting

A decentralized, fully anonymous voting system for EPFL-internal elections.

AnonymityByzantine ResilienceDecentralized
Key facts
Maturity
PrototypeIntermediateMature
Support
C4DT
Active
Lab
Unknown
  • Presentation
  • Pilot
  • C4DT work
  • Technical

The D-Voting project allows for electronic voting without a central point of trust. It relies instead on the majority of servers to be honest during the voting process. The ballots are encrypted during the voting phase, and then shuffled to anonymise the results. When they are finally decrypted, it is not possible anymore to retrace who voted for what.

In Summer 2024, the D-Voting system was used for the first time on a bigger scale to elect the members of the EPFL school assembly. A little bit over 1000 voters used the system to elect the members, and after the resolution of a bug discovered during the on-going voting process, the elections could be successfully concluded. Since then the system has been used multiple times for smaller elections or to poll the EPFL community on administrative questions.

In 2025, the system was used successfully in the election of the school assembly.

Decentralized Distributed Systems Laboratory

Decentralized Distributed Systems Laboratory
Bryan Ford

Prof. Bryan Ford

The DEDIS team is working on projects related to large-scale collective authorities (cothorities), which distribute trust among a number of independent parties to allow scalable self-organizing communities. With no single trusted party, cothorities can secure software updates, provide public randomness, enable privacy-conscious medical-data sharing and a lot more. Other projects include communicating securely over insecure channels and fast, scalable, accountable anonymous communication.

This page was last edited on 2024-11-21.