The Helios Voting Blog

Another update pushed to the Helios server today, with two important enhancements:

1. You can bulk upload voters using comma-separated values (basically Excel.) Currently, the Google App Engine timing limitation means you probably want to bulk upload in chunks of 40 or less, but still much better than one at a time.
2. You can now specify that a question accepts more than one possible answer. Very useful for letting voters select 2 out 7 board members, for example. The crypto proofs are all updated to take into account this enhancement.

The Information Card Foundation is using Helios for its board election. Perfect use case: 50 people who will likely never all meet in person, but who need to vote on some issues. Helios provides them with a feature they literally could not achieve otherwise today: a secret ballot combined with real end-user verifiability that all votes were correctly captured and counted.

All of this practical interest is bringing up a few interesting needs, like a small widget you can post to your page that provides the status of the election and eventually the results. Fun things to think about.