Podemos is a Spanish political party with over 500K members that promotes participatory democracy.
Their electoral processes include primary elections, executive board elections, and binding member consultations on internal political party affairs.
Podemos is a Spanish political party with over 500K members that promotes participatory democracy.
Their electoral processes include primary elections, executive board elections, and binding member consultations on internal political party affairs.
The Challenge
5-6 Electoral Processes per Year
Podemos hosts multiple electoral processes yearly. Many of them are determined within a short time frame, often even one month before the required date and includes different voting regions or the entire party members (over 500K). When the party was established in 2014, they knew immediately that they wanted to start with online voting and needed a system that ensured that elections could be set up easily, in a short time and be convenient for their members.
Complicated Election Requirements
The Podemos party operates all over Spain. Many of the elections take place in specific regions or for national elections across Spain, and each region can have its own set of candidates and winners. This means that Podemos can organize hundreds and even thousands of simultaneous elections in a single event when electing regional or municipal representatives. Voters from different districts receive, in these cases, a different ballot with different questions and candidates, all of which need to be counted separately.
Ensuring the Election Integrity
Political party’s elections are conducted under public eye and highly important for both the party and each candidate. From time to time these elections can even be contested by losing candidates. It was imperative for Podemos to ensure each election was properly secured, conducted with transparency, and the election results can be independently verified with election auditors.
How Sequent Helps Podemos
Podemos chose Sequent’s online voting platform as it provides them with the flexibility of a SaaS platform and the convenience for members to vote using their smart devices or computer from the convenience of their homes, without sacrificing imperative factors like security and privacy, election transparency and verifiable election results.
Easy Election Setup
Sequent first deployed a dedicated environment for Podemos to run their electoral processes on AWS cloud, located in Europe. This deployment includes multiple trustees that are responsible for creating both the election’s private and public keys, shuffling and anonymizing the votes as well as decrypting the voters in order to calculate the final result.
After this initial and one-time deployment, Podemos is able to, with the support of the Sequent’s customer success team, quickly set up and launch any election event, regardless of the numbers of voters, voting regions and different ballot styles as the entire process is fully automated.
Thorough Election Preparation
With the help of our expert team, we have created an election protocol that we have developed over time that strengthens the guarantees of the successful execution of any electoral process.
The election protocol provides a step-by-step and robust configuration of the electoral process, followed by a pre-drill election. This is typically the most time consuming but important process. It ensures all the election stakeholders are informed and approve the election setup, as well as conduct steps during the voting period including the final tallying steps.
When needed, Sequent conducts multiple pre-drill iterations to ensure the voting booth ballots look the way they are expected to and are approved. Even with over 500 different ballots in a single election, the system automates their creation and creates voter-customized voting booths without any errors.
Voter Authentication
For Podemos it was important that voters would be authenticated through their own Podemos portal and would arrive at the voting booths pre-authenticated. To support this, Sequent implemented a smart-link authentication mechanism that allows the platform to be integrated securely using an API with any third-party access management system. This provides the voter experience to be seamless and as familiar as possible.
Accessibility
With over half a million voters that use different smart devices or computer browsers (in different versions), Sequent provides a web based voting application that is completely responsive and accessible across all major devices and browsers versions.
Taking voters with disabilities into consideration, the platform is also fully compliant with the WCAG 2.1 standards (AA) so that everyone is able to vote and participate.
Secure, Transparent & E2E Verifiable System
Election integrity is kept when the elections are run without interference, when the electoral process is transparent and the final election results can be verified by any election auditors. Sequent’s platform was purposely built from day one to ensure exactly that.
Sequent’s platform is built according to, and complies with the 2017 European Council Recommendations on Electronic Voting. It implements cybersecurity best practices to meet today’s highest standards.and GDPR compliance. Furthermore, since Sequent is open-source (The system’s code is publicly available on Github), the solution is continually being reviewed and vetted by academic researchers and security experts. Thus, internal transparency is guaranteed and helps increase public trust and confidence in the electoral process.
Owing to Sequent being end-to-end verifiable, the secrecy of the ballot is always maintained and guaranteed, while at the same time, the platform produces verifiable evidence that each vote is cast, recorded and counted correctly.
After an election ends, election auditors can audit the published evidence and independently verify that the election results are correct.
In Conclusion
To date, we have successfully run over 6 electoral processes with Podemos, the largest of which included more than 500 regional elections (500 ballot styles) and served more than 500K voters.
This is what Podemos’s manager, Rocio Val had to say about working with Sequent:
“Sequent has been running our election processes for a number of years, helping us increase member engagement and bringing a significant level of security and privacy to the voting process.”