Web Bulletin Board

From Scantegrity Wiki

The Web Bulletin Board, or Election Webserver, stores all public election data. This includes the commitment data and receipts that voter's can check. The server also stores news events and other information for voters, as well as links to auditing software for voters who are interested to check the data themselves.

[edit] Requirements

A simple implementation of this component could be a manually updated web page, but a robust, automated, and scalable system is more desirable. Basic requirements for the webserver are as follows:

1. Election Data Upload — The webserver should store data from the SEM, and it should do post-processing where necessary. For example, since SEM only gives plaintext results, the webserver should process them into an HTML table for display on the website.
2. Bulk and Selective Election Data Download — The webserver should provide options, where possible, to allow viewers to download selected records.
3. Receipt Viewer — After the election, viewers should be able to type in a ballot number and receive a table of the confirmation codes for that ballot.
4. Support for hosting multiple elections on the same election platform.
5. Registration and Authentication for Election Authorities and Auditors.
6. Internationalization support, with automatic identification of the first language based on the browser meta-data.
7. Skins to allow webmasters to change the look and feel of the website, and to integrate it into an existing website.
8. The webserver should digitally sign all of it's data.
9. Should run over SSL where applicable.

Additional requirements that we would like to support:

1. A voter database, where voters can verify that they are registered to vote.
2. Integrated components to allow the website to run the SEM software for low-security online-only elections.

[edit] Design

TBD. Given the requirements, we believe that Java server pages are the right technology for the task.