The Prêt à Voter system, introduced by David Chaum, Peter Ryan and Steve Schneider, has been designed to provide secure and auditable elections using cryptographic techniques. Voters can maintain secrecy of their vote, but each voter is provided with a receipt so that they are able to verify that their vote has been properly entered into the system. The receipt is encrypted so it means nothing to others. Furthermore, the system is completely transparent and auditable which means auditors can check in a public way that the result corresponds to the voters cast, providing safeguards against electoral fraud. This paper will give an overview of the Prêt à Voter system at the architectural and system design level. In order to make the introduction more clear, we have divided the Prêt à Voter system into the following three phases: ballot construction phase, ballot casting phase and ballot tallying phase, and we will introduce each of them in turn.

According to the security analysis of the Prêt à Voter system, it is clear that the Prêt à Voter scheme is robust against majority of existing attacks. However, some parts of the original theory is still not satisfied. In this paper, we will introduce some of our proposed future work. In other words, if we were given more time, in what extent we can modify the existing system.

The Prêt à Voter system is a secure and transparent elections system which handles both binary voting methods and ranked voting method. This paper will introduce how the Prêt à Voter system can be implemented in real use. We will explain the detailed election processes and set up some rules for voters and election authorities in each process respectively.

The University of Surrey Student Union holds elections annually to elect sabbatical officers, and the elections for the 2007/8 officers were held over February 28th to March 2nd 2007.  The Prêt à Voter team arranged with the Union to provide an implementation of the Prêt à Voter system to run the election.  The Union was keen to generate wider participation in the election through increased interest and publicity in the new system, since participation was historically low, and there were periodic meetings with the Union in the months before the election to ensure that we could incorporate their requirements into the system that we were developing.  The necessary adaptations are reported in "Lessons from implementing Prêt à Voter".

The Prêt à Voter electronic voting system has been defined and refined in a series of academic papers. We have spent a number of months building one of the first complete implementations of the system and have concluded that those papers treat many aspects of the system on a theoretic level that are not applicable to a real world system. It appears to us that in order to define the details of the application of cryptography, mix networks and so forth a number of assumptions are made that present obstacles on the way to an implementation.

The source code and installation instructions are available here:

The following Conflict of Interest Statements are available: