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Talks and Poster Presentations (with Proceedings-Entry):

R. Krimmer, A. Ehringfeld, M. Traxl:
"The Use of E-Voting in the Austrian Federation of Students Elections 2009";
Talk: 4th International Conference on Electronic Voting 2010 (EVOTE 2010), Bregenz, Austria; 2010-07-21 - 2010-07-24; in: "Electronic Voting", R. Krimmer, R. Grimm (ed.); Gi, Lni, 167 (2010), ISBN: 978-3-88579-261-1; 33 - 44.



English abstract:
The use of e-voting for the elections to the Austrian Federation of
students (Hochschülerinnen und Hochschülerschaftswahlen) was one of the most
sophisticated Austrian e-government projects in 2009. The task was to complement
the paper based voting with an electronic voting channel in order to create new
opportunities to vote. Together with the implementation of e-voting the legal basis
of the federation of students was adapted to include an electronic election
administration. The discussion around e-voting was rather controversial with clear
pro and contra positions.
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-
voting phase, similar to a paper based postal voting procedure. The e-voting
servers were placed in two data centers of the Federal Computing Centre
(Bundesrechenzentrum) to allow for fail-safe operation.
While the discussion around e-voting was rather controversial with clear pro and
con positions, and marked a first nation-wide discussion around remote voting in
general. 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.

Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.