Case Studies Archives - Sequent

Bringing Sequent’s End-To-End Verifiable Voting Solution to the German Market

Serhii Bohynia — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 04:10:38 +0000

Based in Lueneburg, Germany, Electric Paper Informations Systeme (EPI) is a company that provides impactful solutions for the digitalization of the workplace and has been working in the field of tension between “people, paper and processes”. For over 20 years, they have contributed to the efficient conduct of internal elections across departmental and organizational boundaries. EPI has partnered with universities, enterprises, trade unions and chambers of commerce to offer both paper-based and online voting options in elections, ensuring reliable, customizable and scalable end-to-end voting solutions for its customers.

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Bringing Sequent’s End-To-End Verifiable Voting Solution to the German Market

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Challenges

Complicated Electoral Processes

Every year, EPI conducts multiple elections, many of them for both national and highly complex organizations with special ballot requirements that can complicate the election process. One example is the University of Muenster who commissioned EPI to create 99 different ballot styles that included relevant student candidates based on their majors. The complexities of such electoral processes done on paper, increases the possibility of human mistake. In addition, paper-ballot designing, printing, distributing, and counting in this case can be extremely costly and challenging from an operational perspective.

Hybrid Elections – In-Person and Remote Voting

With the COVID-19 pandemic and growing demand from EPI’s clients to make voting more convenient and accessible to voters, EPI needed a solution that would work seamlessly with their election management system (uniWAHL) to provide a fully online or hybrid elections where it was possible to vote both in-person (on paper) and remotely using the voter’s mobile. The solution should also be flexible enough to suit the various requirements of their clients without the need for custom development.

EPI initially thought about developing their own solution for the German market, but developing such a program that adheres to security, accessibility, end-to-end verifiability and regulatory standards comes with a significant amount of capital investment required, development challenges and would dramatically delay the time-to-market.

Security, Regulations and Accessibility

As EPI decided to make the transition to offering its clients the option to vote remotely online (with or without an in-person paper-based voting option) it was now imperative for them to find a solution that allowed them to seamlessly handle online voting with their election management system (uniWAHL) and at the same time, match the same level of security, data-compliance and the Council of Europe Recommendation Standards for e-Voting (e.g. online voting). Furthermore, the solution had to be mobile-friendly, fully responsive and easily accessible to people with disabilities.

How Sequent Helps EPI

EPI selected Sequent’s online voting platform and with the guidance of Sequent’s development team, successfully integrated it with their existing election management software, uniWAHL, to deliver fully online or hybrid elections in a safe, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective way to their clients.

Election configuration and results are imported directly to and from Sequent’s online voting solution (locally branded as EPI’s OWS – Online Voting System) and the entire system is hosted on German Deutsche Telekom servers and is operated on a highly-secure level.

In short, the focus is on providing a combination of paper-based voting, where votes are manually submitted and scanned for tallying, as well as an online solution for remoting voting, EPI along with Sequent’s solution offers an end-to-end voting solution for its clients.

Regulations, Security, and Verifiability

Sequent’s solution has been in development since 2014 in accordance with online voting standards and cybersecurity best practices, including the Council of Europe Recommendation Standards from 2017. Moreover, Sequent is developing its solution as an open-source software, in close collaboration with academic experts and uses battle-tested cryptography to ensure end-to-end verifiability (where voters can individually verify their ballot cast and count them correctly and where auditors can audit the election results) – This is why Sequent’s unique approach was a natural choice for EPI.

Easier Management of Complex Electoral Processes

By leveraging Sequent’s comprehensive API interface, EPI was able to easily design in their election management system multiple, user-friendly ballot styles and seamlessly create a digital copy on Sequent’s platform. In the case of hybrid elections, a twin copy of the paper ballot will be created on the Sequent platform to ensure a unified voter experience. Cast ballots will later be consolidated back into EPI’s system to ensure a single source of record.

Accessibility

Sequent’s online voting platform is a web-based, mobile-friendly, and fully responsive application. This means voters are not obligated to download any app in advance and can use the most current (as well as older models) mobile devices or a PC to cast their ballot. Sequent is also fully compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA standards for people with disabilities.

Cost-Effective Solution

Even though organizations that are transforming to hybrid elections may experience increased costs through the transition period as voters are presented with the option to vote remotely online and/or arrive in-person to vote on paper, it provides the option to gradually narrow down the in-person operations and move online entirely, thus saving costs in the long run. Organizations that are able to move to online voting immediately enjoy the benefits of lower-cost elections right from the start.

Deploying online elections also allows EPI to rely less on expensive human operations to print, deliver and count complex paper ballots in their client elections, in turn, allowing them to onboard more new clients with minimal operations and support.

In Conclusion

With 32 elections and over 250K voters served in 2022 only, Sequent continues to work closely with EPI in delivering dependable, safe, and affordable hybrid or fully online elections that meet the expectations of their clients. “Integrating Sequent’s solution with our existing uniWAHL voting products was a good choice. It empowers our customers to run hybrid or fully online elections while dramatically reducing their overall election cost and logistics.” – Lars Riemenschneider, CEO – Electric Paper Wahlsysteme, Germany.

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Bringing Online Voting to Spanish Political Party, Podemos

Serhii Bohynia — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 08:20:44 +0000

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.

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Bringing Online Voting to Spanish Political Party, Podemos

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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.”

The post Bringing Online Voting to Spanish Political Party, Podemos appeared first on Sequent.