[Baypiggies] Helios Voting and other strategies

[Andrew Dalke]

Rick Kwan <kenobi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Has anyone here used Helios Voting (http://www.heliosvoting.org)? 

I looked at it a bit early last year or so. At that point the demo was in v1. There's a v3 now, which has been used for some votes with over 1,000 people.

My experience with the old version was that there were portability problems like not running under Firefox on my Mac. I don't know what's changed.


On Mar 6, 2010, at 11:39 AM, Stephen McInerney wrote:
> Rick - since time is a big issue for you, just fork out the $20 for
> SurveyMonkey already (up to 1000 responses),


The more relevant questions are, how secure do your elections need to be, how much do you want to trust the election provider, and how much audit capabilities do you want people to have? 

Helios is meant for when the answers are "very", "none at all", and "complete." SurveyMonkey is for when the answers are "somewhat", "a lot", and "doesn't matter."

Helios cannot handle write-in votes (I think), but it can handle things like approval voting. I don't know the details since as far as I know of there's no demo site where one can set up a vote, or see how well the voting system works for your browser. This may have changed since the last time I looked at it.

You might also consider Helios if you wish to support that style of cryptographically provable elections in the future.

> SSL costs an extra $9.95/mo with them:
>   http://help.surveymonkey.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/336/session/L3NpZC9KM0RSeGJXag%3D%3D

This is needless. The question in votes isn't so much "is the connection between you and the provider secure" but "is the provider trustworthy?" But some people won't believe the election is secure unless they see it's over SSL.


				Andrew
				dalke at dalkescientific.com