Last year, the student union of the WU agreed to conduct an election test in parallel to the bi-annual 2003 student union elections with a subset of 1,000 (of the total 20,000) students in IT-related majors.

This year a test election in parallel to the federal president elections on 25th of april are the next step towards a legal-binding e-voting election in Austria.

The e-voting.at team of Prof. Prosser has teamed up with two prominent IT-partners, namely IBM Austria and A-Trust. Those two companies support the trial with both IT hard/software as well as their experience in e-government solution providing. The third partner in the e-voting.at initiative project is the student union at WU.

Furthermore the initiative installed an Election Commission consisting of prominent legal and IT experts:

• the president of the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) Prof. Gabriele Kotsis
  

• Professor for public and administrative law Prof. Michael Holoubek
  

• WU Vice rector Dr. Horst Breitenstein
  

This field trial is one of the largest in Europe to date and is based on the two-phase e-voting.at prototype. For this election the software was enhanced in both system performance and usability based on the experiences made in the May 2003 trial.