Evaluation Report on First Austrian E-Voting Use 28. April 2010 – 19:44 by E-Voting.CC

The final report on the Austrian E-Voting use is online an available for download in German here. Read the short summary of the report on Pep-Net.eu:

The implementation of e-voting for the elections to the Austrian Federation of students was one of the most sophisticated e-government projects in 2009. It’s aim was to complement the paper based voting with an electronic voting channel. Together with the implementation of e-voting the legal basis was adapted to include an electronic election administration.

This first of a kind implementation of e-voting in Austria was technically successful. Almost 1% (2.161) of the eligible students cast their votes electronically between 18th and 22nd of May 2009. For identification and authentication, they used the citizen card (the Austrian model of a smart card with digital signature) and a suitable smartcard-reader device, which was handed out for free. The anonymity was performed by using a cryptographic protocol in the post-electoral phase, similar to a paper based postal voting procedure. The e-voting servers were placed in two data centers of the Federal Computing Centre to allow for fail-safe operation.

The use of the citizen card was appropriate because of its associated high safety and powerful legal standing. However the penetration of the citizen card is rather low at present. Therefore, the federal ministry of science and research started the initiative studi.gv.at with the purpose to raise awareness and penetration of the citizen card amongst students. While over 14.000 students made use of this opportunity, only a small portion of them used e-voting. Main reason to this is the general limited number of applications aimed at students which make use of this card. The general acceptance and with it the penetration numbers for this smart card will only be reached when a wide range and a large number of additional services are provided with appropriate functionality, especially for students.

The discussion around e-voting was rather controversial with clear pro and contra positions. On the one side the federal ministry of science and research and on the other side selected representatives of the federation of students. The discussion dominated the electoral campaigns and hurt the institution of the elections.

For future uses of e-voting in Austria the penetration of identification and authentication means has to be raised as well as a more positive atmosphere amongst the stakeholders has to be reached.

by E-Voting.CC

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Boosting Austria’s “e-Governability”: Studi.gv.at! 25. June 2009 – 15:03 by E-Voting.CC

Earlier I have written about the Student Union elections of May 2009 which were Austria’s first use of a legally binding electronic voting system.

The E-Voting system required the students to authenticate themselves using a citizen card. In Austria this “citizen card function” is included in the social security card, which is called e-card. The e-card was launched in March 2005 in order to modernize the old fashioned system of legitimizing the citizen’s status in front of doctors via the paper version of the “Krankenschein”.

The e-card has since then been issued 8.5 million times according to the official website. 11.151 partners accept the e-card in doctor’s practices all over Austria and it has been used 405 million times for this purpose. But the e-card is much more than a tool for more efficient social security administration. Read the rest of this entry »

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Austrian E-Voting is successfully started! 18. May 2009 – 16:17 by E-Voting.CC

Today at 08:00 am the first legally binding electronic election in Austrian history went online! The Austrian Federal Student Union is being elected starting today morning and running until Friday via a remote electronic channel. Next week from Tuesday the 26th until Thursday the 28th of May an ordinary, paper based voting channel will be opened to ensure.

The paper and the electronic votes will be counted on the 28th and hence the result should be available  around Thursday evening.

The voting system was programmed by the Spanish E-Voting specialist Scytl and is hosted at the Austrian Federal Computation Center. The Austrian Ministry of Science and Research is the initiator, Robert Krimmer from E-Voting.CC is consulting the implementation process.

The going online of the voting system this morning went as planned. A minor problem although occurred with the Intranet connection at the BRZ but this was quickly solved and did in no way affect the voting system itself.

We are glad and also a bit proud, that this project is now successfully in the “delivery phase”, we hope everything will keep running smoothly!

Daniel Botz, E-Voting.CC

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