Auditing the Swiss Post E-voting System: An Architectural Perspective

Switzerland is one of the few countries globally that has a national program for electronic voting (E-voting), which has been evolving in several stages for well over a decade. For the past several years, the program’s most recent stage has focused on introducing strong cryptographic verifiability into the system, together with security features such as trust splitting and a software implementation open to public inspection. Although multiple system providers have participated in the E-voting program in the past, currently the only active provider is the SwissPost. This report represents the author’s analysis of the Swiss Post’s E-voting system as part of an audit that commenced in 2021. This author’s primary role in this audit was to examine the overall architecture of the system from a high-level systems-security perspective, and to study how all the elements of the system fit together to implement an “end-to-end” electronic voting process.