Helios featured on Salon.com

October 23, 2008

Cyrus Farivar does a great job of covering the topic of crypto voting, and not just because he mentions Helios:

One of the strange things about E2E verifiable voting is that it involves cryptography — usually something used to keep things more secret — as a tool to make voting more open and more secure. (Weird, I know.)


Bulk Voter Upload & Multi-Answer Questions

October 7, 2008

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.

Information Card Foundation using Helios

September 18, 2008

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.


Feature Updates

September 12, 2008

The last few weeks have seen significant new Helios features:

  • voter categories, so you can have multiple “precincts”
  • an alpha of a machine API with open registration, so that authentication can be performed by a third-party
  • distributed decryption by multiple trustees (hot off the press a few minutes ago!)

Documentation is outstanding on this, I need to get to that soon.


Source Code and Ticket Tracking

August 16, 2008

If you’re looking for the Helios source code, it’s available via the (so far fantastic) git version control system hosted by GitHub:

and the tickets are tracked by Lighthouse. Anyone who finds a bug or has a feature request is free to enter the info directly into Lighthouse:


Managing the Secret Key

August 15, 2008

To date, Helios has done all of the key management for you, which is really handy when you don’t want to deal with that messiness. And in any case, while a malicious Helios could find out how you voted, it could never fake the tally, thanks to the Helios Verification Specs.

But you might not want Helios to know the secret key to your election. You might want to manage it yourself. Now you can.

However, there is really no way to tally the election if you lose your key. With great power comes great responsibility. So be careful.


How to Verify a Helios Election: the Specs

August 15, 2008

Helios is meant to be verified by anyone. You can go write your own code to verify that Helios is running your election properly. Ah, but to write code, you need specs. So here is the Helios Verification Specification. Feedback welcome!


Helios Voting Blog launched!

August 15, 2008

So with Helios Voting launched a couple of weeks ago, much interest expressed by various folks regarding Helios, and much hacking to keep improving the feature set, it’s time for the Helios Voting blog! Subscribe to stay afloat of Helios Voting developments.

And, of course, go create an election at any time.