Numerous higher education centers are digitally voting; transparency and secrecy of the vote are fundamental.
“We are generating three cryptographic keys for each election. The asymmetric cryptography we work with allows us to transform a readable message into an unreadable one and thus ensures that no one knows the content of the votes”. With this, Rodolfo Álvarez, EVoting’s Assistant Manager, explained the key generation procedure for the six simultaneous elections of the University of Santiago, USACH, which took place this week and was transmitted via streaming for the entire community to see.
With this ceremony, which lasted about 50 minutes, a new electronic election process began in the traditional Chilean university campus and ended a day later, reaching a participation of 92% in the elections of authorities, and 52% in the election of academic councils, faculty, departments and committees.
Transparency is key to ensure the security of electronic voting processes, especially when they take place remotely. Therefore, making the process visible and explaining the key generation ceremony to the respective electoral court and the voters, as well as its importance to ensure the secrecy of the vote, is one of EVoting’s protocol procedures.
“Cryptography is the system that ensures the secrecy of the vote. When the voter marks his or her preference, the encryption process “locks” the vote transforming it into an unreadable message and ensuring the secrecy of the preference,” continued Rodolfo Ávarez.
In 2018, EVoting’s first electronic voting within the academic world was with Andrés Bello University and University Mayor. Today, in mid-2021, a total of 18 universities -15 Chilean, such as the Universidad de Chile, Universidad de Concepción, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, among others-, 2 from Costa Rica -the Universidad de Costa Rica and the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica-, as well as the prestigious Universidad de Cuenca in Ecuador, have carried out more than 170 election processes remotely with EVoting.