The electronic voting system CHVote is a concrete answer and a real breakthrough in digital technology and e-government.
This system is the fruit of a partnership between the State Chancellery and the General Directorate of Information Systems (DGSI) of the Department of Security and Economy (DSE) of the Geneva Canton.
The State of Geneva is pioneering in the e-voting domain with over 100 polls successfully accomplished since 2003.
CHVote, entirely developed, hosted and operated by the Geneva Canton is today one of only two accredited electronic voting systems by the Federal Council in Switzerland. It is offered to nearly 125’000 voters in 4 cantons (Geneva, Bern, Lucerne and Basel), as much for voting as for electing at the communal, cantonal and federal levels. It also allows people with disabilities to participate in the polls.
Since 2010, the Geneva citizens have been granted access to the source code on a written request to the State Council.
On January 29th 2016, the Grand Council, on a proposal from the State Council, unanimously adopted a modification of the law on the exercise of political rights (LEDP), which makes it compulsory to publish the source code of the electronic voting system on the Internet.
The State of Geneva wishes to increase electorate confidence in a transparent and secure system. Indeed, the maximum transparency in matters of political law and e-voting is a priority for the Geneva Canton.
Since March 8th 2015, CHVote has become a so-called second generation system with security requirements laid down by the Swiss Confederation (individual verifiability).
On July 27th 2016, the State Council has chosen to uphold the Affero GPL 3.0 open source license for source code publication, the most up to standards in the field. This license is written by the Free Software Foundation, a token of ethical accuracy and international renown.
The State of Geneva encourages programmer communities to contribute to source code quality.