Security and Confidentiality

The co-cop voting product has many different types of security built into it to protect both the voters as well as the cooperatives using it. 

Voting ID - To assure there is only one vote cast per assigned voter, a unique voter ID is created by the co-op voting product.  Since only aggregate (summary) information is provided to a cooperative, there is no way a cooperative can know the individual on-line votes cast by it's members. The voting ID is not a sequential number. It is a randomly generated number and also has special values imbedded in it which control the election process to further assure the number is a valid voting ID for a specific election.

Delays between logins - When a person enters an invalid voter ID, the system will create an ever increasing delay of time for when the voter login screen is presented back to the person to attempt again. Eventually, the person's I.P. address will be blacklisted.

Blacklisting - In most cases, the voting page will be within a web page of the cooperatives web site. Regardless, this page can be reached from the public by web crawlers and other types of programs. Should a hacker try to attack the web page to continually try different voter ID's, the system will respond by blacklisting the Internet address of the attacker and they will not be allowed to use the system. This occurs after a certain number of consecutive voter ID invalid log-in attempts from the same source. When this happens, co-op voting systems staff is notified of the event by email so we can monitor the system to assure the black list did occur legitimately. This blacklist occurs for ALL customers of the co-op voting product as in most cases, if we want to blacklist a group or person, we want to do it for all of them. When needed, we can easily remove them from the blacklist or even manually add blacklisted addresses. This is controlled by co-op voting administrative staff.

Locking of elections - A cooperative has a great deal of flexibility and control in setting up their election. Once the first vote is cast, the election is locked and cannot be changed throughout the remainder of it's life. Some minor changes to the election are allowed only by sending co-op voting administrative staff a signed letter. A change is only allowed when it will not impact the voting results, such as the ending date of an election being extended once it has started or the fixing of a typo graphical error.

Additional security - There are additional security measures built into the system to further monitor and protect the validity and confidentiality of the voting process, which are not discussed here. Whether you are a co-op member voting using our product or a cooperative using the product to collect votes, you can feel confident the information is credible, secure and confidential.