Distributed trust
Distributed trust in Electa means that no single entity, organization, or individual holds full knowledge, of a voter’s election credentials. Instead, this knowledge is shared across multiple, and independent stakeholders – ideally, at least between your organization representative and the assigned Electa project manager.
In this guide, we will consider an example of an election with two election codes, named “username” and “password”. This means that each voter needs to have a username and a password to access the system.
When setting up the system, ensure that there are two election codes named “Username” and “Password”. Read more on this here.
Start by creating your voter data file, and ensuring that in it you have one column with the voters' usernames, shown in the image below.
Next, encrypt the usernames into public keys, using the keys app. Refer to the Using Keys app guide for instructions on how to do this.
Once this is done, you should have one file (.csv) containing the voter information and the encrypted usernames. This can now be imported into the system.
When importing the voter file, you will need to map the new “public key” column in the system under “Public Key 1“, and leave “Election Code 1“ empty.
The field “Election Code 2” should also be left empty, so that the system automatically generates random and secure passwords for each voter.
For the remaining fields, refer to the Import a voter file guide.
In this process, there are a minimum of two actors:
An organization representative (you) that creates and encrypts election code 1
And, an assigned Electa project manager that imports the voter information with the encrypted codes. The system will automatically generate random and secure election code 2 for all voters once imported.
This means that at most each actor in this process holds only the knowledge of one election code. The voter is the only that knows both election codes and therefore can access the system.
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