Helios x 25K @ UCL

I’m really excited to announce that Helios will power the Recteur election at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), in Belgium. I’ve been working with their team, led by Olivier Pereira and Jean-Jacques Quisquater, for the last 4-5 months to help them evaluate Helios and think about their customization needs.

The UCL team is working on some very challenging issues that pertain specifically to their election rules and needs: 25,000 voters with some very complex tabulation procedures. It’s becoming very clear to us that, for an election of this size, you simply cannot take an off-the-shelf voting system and expect it to work. Rather, every election is its own system, with its own requirements, and Helios will be one module among others. The UCL team has done a fantastic job, including outreach within their community, culminating recently with the public announcement of the election plans. One really important aspect is that this effort will include a significant education portion to get the University community to understand what open-audit voting brings to the table.

There’s more to tell over the next few months. But for now, I’ll just point out that, if we pull this off, this will be, to the best of my knowledge, the largest open-audit election to date, by an order of magnitude.