The e-Vote system in CINECA was created in 1999 for the Ministry of University and Research (MIUR). Since then it has been used for the election of Vice-Chancellors, Council members and other University Commissions in several Italian Universities. At present the system is composed of nearly one hundred polling sites and 205 polling stations; about 10,000 elections have occurred for a total of more then two million votes expressed.
The central system architecture
The main handware components of the e-Vote system are:
- the Public Key Certification Authority;
- the Central Election Office (Ufficio Elettorale Centrale);
- the Central Ballot Box (Urna Centrale);
- the Polling Stations
The Certification Autority creates the digital certificates for the administrators of the eVote system. It is not usually connected to the other components and its' job is the initial issue of the required certificates.
The Central Election Office is a server where the actual election data are mantained for the duration of the event.
The Central Ballot Box is a system where the actual votes are stored. For security reasons in this server there is no data about the voters. The validity of the votes are verified through the authorisations sent by the Central Election Office.
The network infrastructure
The network infrastructure is based on three components:
- The Local Area Network of the polling sites
- The Local Area Nework of the Central System in Cineca
- The Wide Area Network connecting the polling sites to Cineca
The polling sites are geographically distributed and are connected to the central system in CINECA. In each site there are several stations, based on javastations, that allow the voter to express the vote. The javastations are diskless, so no data are stored locally. They completely rely on the Central system where they are recognised via smart cards. Between the local stations and the central servers there is a farm of front-end servers; they are fully redundant and load balanced to guarantee reliability and performance.
