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 involvement in the election was not a complete success.  The system was in place and running effectively at the beginning of the election on February 28th, and accepted 29 votes cast within the first half hour.  In particular, votes were being scanned into the system, and receipts were being provided.  However, the Union was concerned that some of their procedures to do with checking voter registration were not being followed, and also had a concern about the treatment of spoiled ballots.  As a result the Union decided half an hour into the election to revert to their traditional process and not to continue with Prêt à Voter involvement in the election.

In retrospect the root of the problem was a failure of detailed communication between the Prêt à Voter team and the Student Union.  Our expectation was that we were providing the technology to support their election, and that they would provide election officials and the surrounding infrastructure (including the voter registration checks), whereas they were expecting us to run the complete election and provide that infrastructure. The timescale we were working to was very tight, and this did not give sufficient time for dry runs and for training of the Union election officials.  The President of the Union's position following the decision was that "the process of validating of the registered voters and ensuring spoilt ballots could be removed as needed was the problem. And I'm sure your system could have even dealt with that had our communication between our groups improved and the tight timeframe we were working to was increased." [private communication Student Union President to Steve Schneider, 14th March, 2007].   On the positive side, although we were not able to run the complete Student Union election, we did enable a number of voters to cast their votes and thus validated the system.

More recently, on May 16th, we provided a demonstration of the system in a departmental seminar and ran a mini-election.  There were two races: a 'balloon debate', and a 'favourite programming language' race.  There was also a referendum with a yes/no answer.  There were 19 voters, who cast their votes in the seminar.  The system decrypted their votes successfully and the results were also announced in the seminar.