Glossary

  • Authority: the organiser of the election from the Bulletin Board's perspective. In other words, the Decidim instance that created the election.

  • Bulletin Board / Decidim Bulletin Board / BB: an independent application that enables Decidim to run secure and verifiable elections. It receives and stores in an append-only log messages from different sources, such as:

    • The authority (create an election, start an election, end an election, start the tally for an election, publish the results of an election, etc);

    • The trustees (key ceremony, tally);

    • The voter (cast a vote);

  • Key Ceremony: the process that creates the election encryption keys. It requires all the Trustees to take part at the same time, as they will be given a 'piece' of the key. They will have to put back together the key for the tally at the end of the election.

  • Tally: the process of counting the votes that produces the encrypted election results. This happens in the Bulletin Board and follows the encryption standard specified in the election’s voting scheme (probably Electionguard’s implementation of homomorphic encryption). The election results generated can only be decrypted by the Trustees.

  • Trustees: two or more individuals that are the depositaries of the encryption keys for an election. They are the only ones that will be able to decrypt the results of the election putting together the pieces of the decryption key each one of them own.

  • Voter: an identified individual (either with Decidim authentication or a Voting Census) that has the right to vote in the election.