Why Helios?

We learned about Helios Voting from a Carleton CS Tea talk by Josh Benaloh. Helios is an open-source internet voting system in active development by Ben Adida and a small community of developers that was built in coordination with Mr. Benaloh. Helios offers an interesting feature set, and is mostly written in Python, which made it an attractive option for exploration. Helios also boasts a number of academic studies, and lots of related literature like Josh Benaloh’s 2006 paper SVE, which introduced the overall structure of a Helios-like voting system. This popularity and access to resources made Helios an attractive option for our foray into socially distanced i-voting. We discuss some of the features that made looking into Helios worthwhile in Helios Basics.