Sensus is a security-conscious electronic polling system designed for conducting secure and private elections and surveys over the Internet. I developed Sensus as part of my master's research at Washington University in St. Louis. The project has been completed and I have graduated. I am no longer maintaining Sensus.

In theory, Sensus should offer sufficient security and privacy for most polling needs, however, it has not been very well tested (and the current implementation is kind of clunky and won't scale). If you would like to try it anyway and you live in the United States or Canada) you may download the Sensus software and give it a try.

You might also try another implementation based on the Fujioka, Okamoto, and Ohta paper by Ron Rivest and some of his students at MIT. Unlike Sensus, this implementation continues to be maintained and improved.

If you're looking for a simple email voting system with minimal security and no encryption, you may want to take a look at some Perl scripts my husband and I hacked together to run our graduate student government election.

Sensus Information

• Design and Implementation of a Practical Security-Conscious Electronic Polling System [HTML] [Postscript] [HTML extended abstract] [Postscript color slides] [webified (HTML/GIF) color slides]

• Senus Voters' Manual

• Sensus To Do List

• How to Download Sensus

Sensus in the News

• Virtual Democracy: Is the Internet the ultimate voting booth? an Off the Record interview with Lorrie Cranor by Brian S. McWilliams (mirrored at PC World Online)

• Danial Akst mentioned Sensus in a column which appeared in the following newspapers:

  POSTCARD: Do We Really Want This Much Participatory Democracy? Los Angeles Times Monday, March 18, 1996, p. D11

  Casting ballots in cyberspace The Boston Globe March 21, 1996, p.37

• Sensus and DSV are mentioned in Ballot Lines by Graeme Browning, National Journal, 4/20/96, pp.879-882