Title

Norwegian experiences with verifiable electronic voting

Abstract

During the local elections in September 2011, Norway conducted trials with remote electronic voting. 10 municipalities, with approximately 168.000 eligible voters, participated in the trials.

The Norwegian e-voting solution offers verifiability of the entire vote life cycle, from voter intent to counted ballot. After voting, a so-called return code is sent to the voter by SMS. This return code can be compared to the voter’s individual poll card, and is a proof that the voter’s intent is captured correctly. The Norwegian solution can also prove mathematically that all cast votes are also stored, and that all valid stored votes are counted correctly. These proofs are not made public, but are verifiable to independent third parties.

The presentation will go through the lessons learnt from designing, procuring, implementing and operating the Norwegian electronic voting system, with special focus on the challenges and benefits related to verifiability.

Biographies

Ida Stenerud works as a senior adviser in the Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, which is the Norwegian election management body (EMB). During the e-vote 2011 project Ida was responsible for the functional operations the electronic voting system. This involved user interface design of the voting application, as well as design and execution of the high security back-end solution used for configuring the e-voting system.

Ida has a master degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.  

Henrik Nore has been project manager for the evote2011 project  since 2008 and is now responsible for the Norwegian election systems. He works in the Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, which is the Norwegian election management body (EMB).  Henrik has a master degree in engineering from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and an MBA from IESE in Barcelona.