Barcelona-based ISV Scytl has developed an innovative platform for secure electronic voting, and is working with Oracle to market it to government organisations across Europe. We talked to Scytl managing director Pere Vallés to learn more about this cutting edge technology area for the government sector.

Electronic voting has long been a contentious area in Europe. On one hand, e-voting has the potential to boost the number of people who choose to vote in an election, referendum or consultation - thus strengthening the democratic process. It can also bring down the cost of running an election quite dramatically, even if the electoral roll rises.

On the other, people still have a suspicion about the validity and security of electronic participation - they still want the trust factor of going to a polling station and putting their paper ballot into a physical box.

Pere Vallés, managing director of Barcelona-based ISV Scytl, is well aware of these contentions. His company is aiming to dispel the security fears surrounding electronic voting with the introduction of an innovative secure e-voting platform, Pnyx.

Pnyx started life as a PhD research project at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and was commercialised in 2001. Its potential to extend democratic participation has already been recognised by the European Commission, which this year awarded Scytl its prestigious Information Society Technologies prize - an accolade awarded to just 20 companies out of 420 entrants.

Based on a patented cryptographic engine, the software aims to recreate the physical voting process in an electronic way, to reassure voters, says Vallés.

"People trust things that are tangible, things they can feel," he says. One of the ways Scytl is addressing this is with its patented voting receipts. "Our solution generates voting receipts based on randomly-generated unique identifiers which allow voters to confirm that their votes have reached the Electoral Board and have been counted".

Pnyx has been implemented by the canton of Neuchâtel in Switzerland for binding elections and consultations, while the City of Madrid has used it to enable citizens to participate in a consultation via the internet and mobile phone. A version of the software is also being used in the private sector for secure electronic shareholder voting and workers' union ballots.

Pnyx is also currently being implemented by the Parliament of Catalunya to enable politicians to vote remotely on parliamentary issues in special, pre-defined circumstances - if they are ill, for example, or on maternity leave.

Vallés sees much market potential for this last application of its technology, and is working with Oracle - on whose database and application server technology the software is based - to help market it in other European countries.

"Like us, Oracle sees the potential for growth in the electronic voting market, even though right now it is a relatively new market," Vallés says. "We've found Oracle to be very committed to helping us market our software to other parliaments in Europe."

Oracle and Scytl are also going to market together in another well-defined niche in the public sector: e-participation in local and regional government. Increasingly, local and regional authorities are soliciting the opinion of citizens in large-scale consultations via the internet and other electronic channels. Scytl's Pnyx platfom gives them a range of web-based e-participation tools, such as forums, chat and secure voting on the issues under consultation.

Oracle is working closely with Scytl to promote the technology as part of its Public Sector industry footprint, by which it actively markets and recommends third-party Oracle-based applications that complement to its own horizontal applications suite and deliver added value to end-user organisations.

"We only started our partnership with Oracle recently, but we've found them to be very committed to helping us expand our markets," says Vallés. "It's a very positive working relationship."

Where Next?

Find out more about Scytl: Scytl website

Find out more about partnering with Oracle: Oracle PartnerNetwork