D-Voting
The collaboration between Bryan Ford’s DEDIS lab and the C4DT Factory team has culminated in the successful development and deployment of D-Voting. It is a privacy-preserving, secure, and auditable e-voting system for EPFL’s internal elections. Building on a six-year journey that began with the initial e-voting platform in 2018, the D-Voting system incorporates DEDIS’s latest blockchain solution, DELA, to enhance performance and security. After many years of development by semester students, the C4DT Factory team worked on the code to address critical issues related to blockchain performance and user interface design. This effort shows how research projects from EPFL can be used as a base for innovative and novel projects with real-world usage.
Now that the project has been in production for more than half a year, it was used in four different elections and consultations on EPFL level. These elections involved between 1000 and 2000 votes and allowed to iron out some of the last bugs in the system. The C4DT Factory team continues to supervise semester projects to further improve and optimize the D-Voting system. This includes technical work on the network layer, security aspects by further decentralizing the system, and making the UI more accessible. This ongoing collaboration emphasizes the Factory’s commitment to supporting innovative projects that integrate student-driven development, research software expertise, and open-source technology, ultimately advancing digital trust for the benefit of EPFL’s partners and future projects.