Electronic voting
National ballots are conducted on paper, and Article 245(2) permits no other means for them. Communal, sub-regional, regional and participatory procedures may be conducted on software written by the Republic, published in full, and open to public testing.
Article 245(2): a vote in a national election, referendum or recall may in no case be cast, recorded, stored or counted by electronic means.
Article 245(9): paper voting stays available in every procedure. No resident is ever required to hold a device, to install an application, or to vote by electronic means, and the availability of electronic voting in no way reduces the number, the distribution and the accessibility of polling stations.
The eight conditions on electronic voting
Electronic voting is lawful only where all of the following are met at once:
- The application, the systems that receive and count the votes, and every component of either are free and open software belonging to the knowledge commons under Article 10, with source, build procedure, specification and operating configuration public.
- The build is reproducible, and the checksum of the official binary is published in advance.
- Any person may obtain, examine, build, test and attack the software, and publish criticism of it, without authorisation and without liability.
- The ballot is secret, and the system discloses to no person how any resident voted.
- The resident may verify that their vote was recorded and counted as cast, without disclosing its content and without acquiring any means of proving it to another.
- Results are published by district in open form, and the computation is reproducible by any person.
- An audit by the data division of the Defender of Rights and by an independent body precedes each use and is published with its findings.
- Only the official binary takes part. A binary whose checksum departs from the published one is refused, however faithfully it was built.
Check a binary
The Commission refuses any binary whose checksum departs from the published checksum. The published value for the current release is:
4f1c9a7d2e6b8305c4aa19fe7730d2b18c56e0a94d3f27bb610c8ee5a2947d3f
The checksum reported by the device is entered above.
The comparison runs in the browser and reports nothing to the Commission.
Origin of the application
The Republic distributes the application from its own source, free of charge, installable without an account and without connection to any other service. The Republic pays no proprietary distribution platform, contracts with none, accepts the conditions of none, and requires no resident to hold an account with one.
The application is coupled to the commune of residence, and the application takes part in no national procedure. Cooperatives producing devices offer preinstallation at the choice of the person ordering under Article 108(7). A device made outside the Republic gets the application from the same source, and Article 109(7) secures the installation.
Doubt as to a result
Article 245(10): where the integrity of an electronic procedure is in doubt, the Commission annuls it and conducts the procedure on paper. The doubt need not be resolved before the annulment.
The annulment precedes the investigation. One communal initiative was annulled on this ground in May 2026, after a clock discrepancy in two receiving systems, and was conducted again on paper eleven days later.
Extending electronic means
Organic law may extend electronic means to further participatory procedures upon the same eight conditions, and in no case to a national election, referendum or recall. The distinction is fixed by the Constitution and lies outside the competence of the Commission.