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E-Voting Solution Electis.app, Built On Tezos Adopted By Students From More Than 80 Global Universities Including King’s College London

Electis

Electis describe themselves as a:

‘non-governmental organization based on the following principles: non-profit, non-commercial, and politically and philosophically neutral. Our core purpose is to help improve our democratic systems by promoting the best usage of technologies (“Tech for Democracy”), with a specific focus on electoral processes which are at the core of democratic life.’

We first heard about Electis when they announced that they would run the Cross-University Voting project on the Tezos blockchain.

The Adoption Of 80 Global Universities Including Kings College London

Today, it has been announced that more than 80 global universities including Kings College London, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Ritsumeikan University in Japan have adopted the Electis voting system built on Tezos.

To give some idea of the caliber of these universities, the University College London is the largest university in the UK by total enrolment both at undergraduate and post-graduate levels. It is ranked as the 10th best university in the world.

It features the UCL Centre For Blockchain Technologies, which is committed to becoming:

the leading global research hub focussed on Blockchain technologies.

It was stated: ‘The adoption of Electis.app by students from more than 80 leading global universities confirms that the Electis.app e-voting solution meets the requirements of trust and usability for local governments, organizations, and non-profits across the globe. Powering the Electis.app are the Tezos blockchain and open-source SDK ElectionGuard.

The results of e-voting elections on the Electis.app are, for the first time, immutably recorded through a smart-contract on the Tezos blockchain, a decentralized, public blockchain that evolves by upgrading itself through on-chain governance, adding a further level of transparency and security to e-voting systems.

The architecture of ElectionGuard allows votes to be shared publicly and tallied without the need to decrypt them individually (secret tallying), keeping each vote anonymous, while ensuring end-to-end verifiability since each vote has a unique ID known by the voter.’

Gilles Mentré, co-founder of Electis commented:

“We are particularly proud to deploy Electis.app. E-voting will foster participation and trust in our democracies, provided it is developed in an open-source and non-profit manner. The students adopting the solution today are going to shape the democracy of tomorrow.”

Additionally, Co-Founder Franck Nouyrigat stated:

“We deeply believe that the future of e-voting must be open-source and decentralized to bring trust. By decentralizing the legal proof of elections on Tezos we open the door to exciting new perspectives: imagine voting and almost instantly validating a legal chain that usually takes weeks or even months!”

The Ambitious Launch

The launch of the Electis.app solution took place within the framework of an ambitious inaugural inter-university voting project allowing students from more than 80 universities around the world (including King’s College London, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne or the Ritsumeikan University) to organize elections and vote on various subjects, from internal consultation to the official election of representatives.

This project included a vote on the most important law of the last thirty years, in the context of the 30th anniversary of the Political Book Day (Journée du livre politique) organized by the association “Lire la société”, which gathered students from more than 32 universities in France.

Feedback

So far, the feedback has been very positive. Uwe Serdült, from Ritsumeikan University, comments

“The Electis mockup vote gave our IT students a first hand experience on how modern internet voting should be carried out, open and as decentralized as possible. Internet voting projects such as Electis are crucial for the future of democracies. Without elections going digital, the political process will become less accessible, in particular for the younger generation”.

In addition, Luce Perrot from “Lire la société” stated:

“We were happy to successfully experiment Electis.app and involve students from various French universities. I have always been personally committed to move forward on innovative solutions that can increase participation and engagement from citizens, and especially young voters”.