EIP in Practice
While the requirement for secret ballots is the "platinum standard” for public elections, these are held only every 2 to 4 years in the US. In the meantime, other types of elections occur and EIP can help facilitate these as well.
For example, many professional organizations hold internal elections all the time. You might hold these at Board of Directors meetings, or to facilitate policy changes over the course of time for ay a Home Owners Association. Perhaps internal polling is of interest
Another consideration is whether or not to hold elections remotely. Public sector elections cannot support this because they require a secret ballot, but not all elections have this stringent requirement. If the voter privacy requirement can be relaxed a little bit, then many other types of elections can be held remotely. This makes the use of EIP a lot more practical and can therefore become widespread - only holding in-person elections when absolutely necessary. This is particularly useful for member organizations that are widespread geographically. It’s an efficient and cost-effective way to conduct elections at scale on a regular basis.
From a standards adoption perspective, this is important because people can get used to performing elections in a common way, and so when general (public) elections come along, they are already familiar with the process.
Secret Ballot Elections
Contact us to set one of these up for you. Takes a few minutes to set up a demo.
Mock Elections
We've held one of these to date, deliberating over the best ice cream in the world.
Anonymous & Roll Call Elections
Recent changes to the EIP reference implementation now allow the public to conduct elections that don't require a secret ballot (see discussion above). While these types of elections are operating in a degraded mode with respect to the platinim standard of secret ballots & voter privacy, they are nevertheless useful in a wide array of applications.
Conducting An EIP Election
Before an election or poll can be run, you must be able to provide the following information:
- Specify Voter Eligibility Requirements - who is elible to vote and how are they notified
- Determine the Voter Privacy Mode required - secret, anonymous or exposed
- Decide the Vote Dissemination Policy - are all votes to be released or just a summary (percentages)?
Validating an Election (tracking your vote)
Once an election has concluded, the results need to be verified. EIP eletions produce 2 primary ledgers that enable this activity. The first is a Voter Eligibility Status (VES) ledger which is simply a list of the names of all the voters who registered to participate in the election.
The second and most important ledger is the Cast Vote Record (CVR) Ledger which lists all the votes in the election indexed by their associated Vote Tracking Number, or Ballot Audit Mark (BAM). This ledger contains all the election results. Here the voter can look up their vote to ensure it was cast accurately. In addition, they can count all the votes themselves without requiring a vendor or a Teller Committee to do so.
You can take a look at both of these ledgers here: EIP Ledgers.
Please contact us for details and we can point you to EIP compliant organizations that supply these types of services