---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <[email protected]> Date: Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:18 AM Subject: [Bukas] UPD holds first campus-wide computerized USC elections To: [email protected]
picked up from plaridel papers list ------- UPD holds first campus-wide computerized USC elections May 10, 2009, 3:20pm Comelec could take lessons from UP Diliman (UPD) students. On February 25, UPD held its first campus- wide computerized University Student Council (USC) elections, with a little over 10,000 students casting their votes and the results coming only minutes after 7 p.m., when the precincts were declared closed. The open source voting system called “Halalan” was created by the University of the Philippines Linux Users Group (UnPLUG), a student organization at the College of Engineering (CoE). Students flocked to precincts in their respective colleges from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. to vote. The colleges provided the computers for the elections. The voting process started with students presenting their IDs or Form-5s to attending poll clerks, who checked the list of valid voters. Students on the list then received their passwords from the poll clerks and proceeded to unoccupied voting stations. Using their student numbers and the passwords provided as login information, they opened their electronic ballots and marked the boxes of their chosen candidates. Once they clicked the confirm button, their votes were final and they were automatically logged out. The system allows voters to login again but only to check their votes, not change them. There were a few glitches during the elections, however. In an interview with the UP Newsletter, Rystraum Fabe Gamonez, president of UnPLUG, cited the two most common problems: browsers and computers that crashed, and passwords where there were difficulties involving distinguishing between “I” (capital I) and “l” (small L) and “O” (capital O) and “0” (zero) in individual passwords. Because UnPLUG members were on hand to assist, these problems were immediately addressed. The first working prototype of Halalan was created in January 2005 and presented to UPD student councils and student publications later that month at the Palma Hall Lobby. Its first application in the USC elections was at the CoE and the School of Statistics in 2007. A year later, the College of Business Administration, the College of Mass Communication, and the School of Library and Information Studies also adopted the system. According to Gamonez, Halalan is secure primarily because it was only available to computers with wired connections to the Diliman Network (Dilnet). He clarified that the Dilnet Wi-Fi is considered an outside connection, and that any attacker could easily be tracked because he would have to come from within the network. Moreover, UnPLUG only relayed passwords through encrypted (https) connections. These passwords were a mix of a random set of small letters, capital letters, numbers, and special characters. Other security measures included the inability to vote twice using the same student number and issued password, and the captcha, which provides protection against automated scripts. Halalan is not only secure, but also accurate and tamper-free. During a demo of the system on February 6 at the CoE, Gamonez said that once votes were cast, they were automatically counted by the system. The only thing that was manual in the processing of ballots was the printing of the final and certified election results. _______________________________________________ Bukas mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ph.net/mailman/listinfo/bukas -- Daniel O. Escasa independent IT consultant and writer contributor, Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com) personal blog at http://descasa.i.ph Twitter page at http://www.twitter.com/silverlokk If we choose being kind over being right, we will be right every time. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
