Deploying Electronic Democracy for Public Corporations

Abstract

The term electronic voting is often used as a method to stop sinking voter turnout or to enhance the accessibility of the election. Before conducting an election using electronic voting, technical standards and legal issues have to be solved. In Austria the “social partnership” model is built upon numerous public corporations, such as the chamber of Commerce or the Student Union. These corporations suffer in contrast to elections to the national parliament from a low voter turnout. As e-voting is seen as one measure to raise voter participation, the Austrian national parliament passed the Student Union bill on 1st of February 2001 that allows e-voting in the context of the bi-annual student elections. In this paper the authors present e-voting in the Student Union in a three-fold way. First the legal situation is addressed, then the acceptance of e-voting by voters and finally the technical solution of a two phased method that is used for a test election during the 2003 Student Union elections. It is based on a Kerberos-style algorithm designed to guarantee the separation of the identification process and the registration process as well as to prevent a malicious server administration from generating fake votes.