History of online voting

Electronic voting is a mature technology that has been with us since the 1960s. Online voting, a variant of electronic voting over the Internet, has seen its use spread for private purposes since the beginning of this century, even being used in several presidential elections in countries such as Estonia.

The technology that underpins online voting systems is complex. But our goal is to make your life easier. So let's try to explain how it works in the simplest way possible.

Similarities with per post voting

The great challenge of electronic voting is not to replace in-person voting, but to serve as an alternative to postal voting: a more efficient, economical and sustainable alternative. Therefore, when we talk about security in electronic voting, we must establish as a criterion the security of postal voting, with its virtues and defects. 

Confidentiality, anonymity, integrity, availability, authenticity or traceability are the characteristics to which we must pay attention in both cases. Below, we explain what each one means. And in the next section we describe how we take care of all of them at Kuorum. If at some point you get lost, we recommend that you try to find an analogy with per post voting. That's the best way to understand it. Let's get to it!

The 5 pillars (+1) of information security

In an increasingly digitalized world, cybersecurity (or information security) is of vital importance. Banks, healthcare companies and public administration, among others, handle very sensitive information and must follow certain guidelines when managing this data to prevent risks and mitigate the impact of possible security breaches. 

If you work in any of these fields, you are probably familiar with the 5 pillars of information security: CIATA (confidentiality, integrity, availability, traceability and authenticity). Well, in the online voting sector we must add one more pillar: anonymity. And so, to the 5 previous pillars (CIATA) we must add the pillar of anonymity (CIATAA). To achieve this, we use cryptographic algorithms as we will explain below.