A Proposal of Blockchain-based Electronic Voting System

Online Voting System Project Application

A Proposal of Blockchain-based Electronic Voting System

The Estonian electronic voting system which is a leading electronic voting system still suffers from universal veri-fiability issues and may need improvement of its availability. To solve the problems, in this paper we propose a blockchain-based electronic voting system. A blockchain is a distributed database, where the complete data is shared among all participants in the network. A blockchain system by its nature has several advantages that suit an electronic voting system. Its distributed architecture provides high availability to the system because it does not rely on a centralized server. As all participants have complete data, the protocol allows them to verify each block that is appended to the chain. We try to combine the double envelope encryption technique and blockchain technology for our proposed electronic voting system. Code Shoppy

Democracy and voting are pillars of modern society, but the traditional paper ballots are prone to fraud and failure; ballots can be miscounted, or ballots sent via mail might get lost in transit. The traditional voting system also carries the costs of human resources, ballot deployment, and security measures. A massive amount of money is usually spent every election in every country.Declining trends of participant rate in some countries have also appeared in recent years. [1] One of the reasons seems to be that youths find going to voting centers to vote impractical. [2, p. 31-32] Therefore, the need for a more practical voting system is increasing. As the internet may be a promising platform for youth engagement in politics [3], internet voting seems like a natural way to increase participation.Some special adverse conditions also need to be considered. In Catalonia, Spain, a local referendum was held in 2017. However, the referendum had been declared illegal by the central government in Madrid, and on referendum day police stormed voting centers, confiscating ballot boxes and allegedly used violence against voters [4]. This is one example of the problematic nature of holding a democratic vote during an unstable state of affairs.For electronic voting systems to be viable, we consider it necessary that they are easier to use and at least as secure as secure as traditional elections, and must be able to eliminate human error. This is difficult to achieve because electronicvoting systems need strong encryption to guarantee security, integrity, and anonymity of the vote, while still being au-ditable. This must be ensured and still result in a user-friendly application, which is often hard to achieve.Below is a requirement list for making a voting system applicable to the real-world, based on [5]–[7].
When Bitcoin was introduced in 2008 [9], it enabled trans-actions of funds without a trusted middleman. However, the underlying technology, called “blockchain”, has found many further uses, both by means of building on top of Bitcoin and by creating new blockchain protocols. A blockchain is an immutable ledger of events, and those events can be any kind of data. Ethereum [10] uses the ledger to perform arbitrary (Turing complete) computing tasks and data storage. So-called colored coins [11] use the Bitcoin blockchain for creating a framework of digital currencies with extra capabilities. A blockchain is, contrary to popular belief, not secret or anonymous. Rather, it is pseudonymous, meaning all activity is visible to anyone, but every actor may hide behind a “name” with no connection to their real identity, much like on an online message board.A prolific use case for blockchain technology is democratic voting [12]. This could allow for democratic votes that can be easily monitored by outside observers, making miscounting next to impossible. Available products like Follow My Vote[13] and Sovereign [14] aim to revolutionize voting by making vote counting transparent, yet privacy-preserving. Both prod-ucts let users pass on their votes to delegates, or vote on their own, through an application interface, as well as verify that their votes have been counted correctly. However, they do not explicitly present the implementation. Therefore, it is difficult to analyze how their blockchains are applied to voting. We aim to design and build a blockchain-based voting system that can handle the most adverse conditions imag-inable. Based on the requirements we stated previously, the voting system in Catalonia’s referendum would have needed improvement in its availability. We need a voting system that does not allow third-party to easily disturb or dismiss a legal referendum or election. This may happen either when some central authority prohibits a democratic vote, or when infrastructure and safety and trust issues make it hard to hold a physical vote, or both. By utilizing the strengths of blockchain that distributes trust to participant in its network, we can improve the availability of a voting system without relying on social trust. Also, the openness of blockchain can improve the universal verifiability of a voting system. In this paper, we propose our first blockchain-based electronic voting system that solves availability and universal verifiability issues in the current electronic voting systems.
In this paper, we proposed a blockchain-based voting system and did an early stage implementation of our system. The advantages and disadvantages of using blockchain as an e-voting system were also described. We also gave a qualitative evaluation to our proposed system by using the criteria de-scribed in Sect. II and analysis of it.Our proposed system still has wide room for improvements as described in Sect. VIII. Also, it needs time to popularize blockchain for a voting system as it is a novel idea and voting itself is a crucial matter in a democratic country. However, we believe improvements in future e-voting systems will provide a better solution to the current issues. Click Here