[3] It was created by Ben Adida, a software engineer involved in other projects such as Creative Commons and Mozilla Persona.

The administrator prepares the ballot and creates a voter roll—these can be edited at any time before voting starts.

[12] A voter, from the voting roll created by the administrator, receives an email with the voter's username, a random password for that specific election, a URL to the voting booth, and an SHA-1 hash of the election parameters.

Once a reasonable amount of time for auditing had passed, Helios decrypted the ballots and tallied the votes.

[7] Helios 2.0, designed in 2008 and currently in use, abandoned the shuffling and switched to a homomorphic encryption scheme proposed by Cramer, Gennaro and Schoenmakers.

[14] The Helios platform is intended to be utilized in low-coercive, small scale environments such as university student governments.

Since 2009 the Universite Catholique de Louvain used Helios to elect its university president (of around 25,000 eligible voters, some 5,000 registered and 4,000 voted).

[citation needed] Since 2010, the International Association for Cryptographic Research has used Helios annually to elect board members.