VOTEGRITY
CYBERSECURITY
VOTEGRITY SECURITY + VERIFIABILITY = INTEGRITY
Votegrity is Security Plus
As all consumers of voting software should mandate, the election protocols of our systems have two key properties: ballot casting assurance and universal verifiability. This is how voters, administrators, and/or auditors can verify votes were properly tallied and cast as intended. If vendors you are considering don’t have this, you may be putting your election at risk and not realize it.
At its core, Votegrity is a tech-based decision making business rooted in cryptography. Homomorphic encryption—the ability to perform computations on encrypted data without first decrypting it—is how Votegrity protects ballots and the integrity of elections.
What makes Votegrity different/better?
First and foremost, our online voting solution unlike many competitors uses end-to-end verification (open-audit) not a blackbox security implementation. This is the industry standard required for online elections. Votegrity’s implementation is truly verifiable. Each voter is given a ballot tracker that can be used to guarantee their ballot was received and counted as intended. This means no one, not even Votegrity, can alter a vote.
What makes the ballot tracker so special?
A typical tracking number, say for shipping a package, is more or less a random number: it means nothing other than the label on your package. It’s conceivable that your package gets there, tracking number intact, but its contents destroyed. In the digital world, we’re able to produce a special kind of tracking number that is far from random: it is a fingerprint of the encryption of your vote. So, if your ballot tracker makes it all the way to the tally, you know that not only did your ballot make it into the tally, you also know that it wasn’t tampered with in the process. All of this is possible due to the cryptographic underpinnings of how our system works.
Is my ballot secret though?
Votegrity takes great care to protect the secrecy of your vote. For online voting your vote is encrypted inside your browser before it is securely sent to the server via SSL. The vote is then stored in the database in encrypted form. When the polls close, Votegrity uses advanced cryptographic techniques (homomorphic encryption) to combine all of the encrypted votes into an encrypted tally, and then the tally is decrypted, not the plain text ballots like many competitors. This means that your ballot is never individually decrypted, unless submitted via paper or a special tabulation method is required. To provide for the highest level of privacy, if appropriate, Votegrity lets election administrators designate multiple trustees. All trustees must be involved in decryption, which further ensures that only the tally, never the individual votes, are decrypted.
