The Project (2001-2003)

The full title of the EU project TRUE-VOTE is "A SECURE AND TRUSTABLE INTERNET VOTING SYSTEM BASED ON PKI". This project aims to contribute to the technological development and the increase of the Community users’ trust in information society technology tools to offer services, such as voting, by experimenting the potential of secure electronic voting integrated in the framework of a public key infrastructure.

The objective of the project is to design and implement a secure Internet based voting system integrated with existing Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) and to demonstrate the advantages and the possibilities in terms of direct democracy and free expression of opinions offered by secure electronic voting by means of polling and voting sessions organized for Internet enabled users (community networks) and traditional users.The sociological analysis of the polling and voting session results will allow to understand the level of confidence and trust of the users in information society technology tools, the degree of acceptance of such tools in different socio-cultural areas and with respect to different users’ technological skills.

According to the goals of the project the research and demonstration activities are tightly coupled. In fact, in the Information Society, an innovation in the technology cannot be disjoint from a careful analysis of the impact of that technology on people and organisations. This is of course even more fundamental for a project which deals with such a basic and critical issue as a voting system is: depending from the kind of application of the technology under development, a change in the voting technology will influence: citizens - owner of a sovereignty power typically played at election time - in their relationships with public institutions, or citizens - seen as customers - in their relationships with private and public institutions which provide them goods and services, and wish to understand their needs and satisfaction degree through surveys and polls. Therefore users requirements, expectations and constraints will be taken into account from the very beginning to develop a technology able obtains users trust, as the project acronym points out. This is to say that the project will adopt a participatory approach, in which technology is designed and implemented not only for the users, but with their involvement through the demonstrators which will play a role in the project from its early phases.


A bibliography and a list of links to Internet sites with electronic voting related information can be found at my own Electronic Voting Page.