Role of Digitalization in Election Voting Through Industry 4.0 Enabling Technologies

The election voting system is one of the essential pillars of democracy to elect the representative for ruling the country. In the election voting system, there are multiple areas such as detection of fake voters, illegal activities for fake voting, booth capturing, ballot monitoring, etc., in which Industry 4.0 can be adopted for the application of real-time monitoring, intelligent detection, enhancing security and transparency of voting and other data during the voting. According to previous research, there are no studies that have presented the significance of industry 4.0 technologies for improving the electronic voting system from a sustainability standpoint. To overcome the research gap, this study aims to present literature about Industry 4.0 technologies on the election voting system. We examined individual industry enabling technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) that have the potential to strengthen the infrastructure of the election voting system. Based upon the analysis, the study has discussed and recommended suggestions for the future scope such as: IoT and cloud computing-based automatic systems for the detection of fake voters and updating voter attendance after the verification of the voter identity; AI-based illegal, and fake voting activities detection through vision node; blockchain-inspired system for the data integrity in between voter and election commission and robotic assistance system for guiding the voter and also for detecting disputes in the premises of election booth

Analysis of Blockchain Solutions for E-Voting: A Systematic Literature Review

To this day, abstention rates continue to rise, largely due to the need to travel to vote. This is why remote e-voting will increase the turnout by allowing everyone to vote without the need to travel. It will also minimize the risks and obtain results in a faster way compared to a traditional vote with paper ballots. In fact, given the high stakes of an election, a remote e-voting solution must meet the highest standards of security, reliability, and transparency to gain the trust of citizens. In literature, several remote e-voting solutions based on blockchain technology have been proposed. Indeed, the blockchain technology is proposed today as a new technical infrastructure for several types of IT applications because it allows to remove the TTP and decentralize transactions while offering a transparent and fully protected data storage. In addition, it allows to implement in its environment the smart-contracts technology which is used to automate and execute agreements between users. In this paper, we are interested in reviewing the most revealing e-voting solutions based on blockchain technology

A Review of Blockchain-Based E-Voting Systems: Comparative Analysis and Findings

The emergence of blockchain has ushered in a significant transformation in information systems research. Blockchain’s key pillars such as decentralization, immutability, and transparency have paved the path for extensive exploration in various research domains. This particular study is focused on electronic voting, aiming to improve voting procedures by making better use of the benefits offered by blockchain technology. Through a comprehensive review of existing literature, we highlight the potential benefits of blockchain-based electronic voting systems such as transparency, security, and efficiency. However, several challenges, such as scalability, personal data confidentiality, and ensuring robust identity verification, persist. Addressing these issues is necessary to unlock the full potential of blockchain-based electronic voting systems, thereby fostering the development of trustworthy election systems in the future

BBB-Voting: 1-out-of-k Blockchain-Based Boardroom Voting

Voting is a means to agree on a collective decision based on available choices (e.g., candidates), where participants (voters) agree to abide by their outcome. To improve some features of e-voting, decentralized solutions based on a blockchain can be employed, where the blockchain represents a public bulletin board that in contrast to a centralized bulletin board provides $100\%$ availability and censorship resistance. A blockchain ensures that all entities in the voting system have the same view of the actions made by others due to its immutable and append-only log. The existing blockchain-based boardroom voting solution called Open Voting Network (OVN) provides the privacy of votes and perfect ballot secrecy, but it supports only two candidates. We present BBB-Voting, an equivalent blockchain-based approach for decentralized voting than OVN, but in contrast to it, BBB-Voting supports 1-out-of-$k$ choices and provides a fault tolerance mechanism that enables recovery from stalling participants. We provide a cost-optimized implementation using Ethereum, which we compare with OVN and show that our work decreases the costs for voters by $13.5\%$ in terms of gas consumption. Next, we outline the extension of our implementation scaling to magnitudes higher number of participants than in a boardroom voting, while preserving the costs paid by the authority and participants -- we made proof-of-concept experiments with up to 1000 participants

A decentralized consensus application using blockchain ecosystem

The consensus is a critical operation of any decision-making process. It involves a set of eligible members; whose decision need to be honored by taking their acknowledgment before making any decision. The traditional consensus process follows centralized architecture, the members need to rely on and trust this architecture. The proposed system aims to develop a secure decentralized consensus application in the untrusted environment by making use of blockchain technology along with smart contract and interplanetary file system (IPFS)

Dispute-free Scalable Open Vote Network using zk-SNARKs

The Open Vote Network is a self-tallying decentralized e-voting protocol suitable for boardroom elections. Currently, it has two Ethereum-based implementations: the first, by McCorry et al., has a scalability issue since all the computations are performed on-chain. The second implementation, by Seifelnasr et al., solves this issue partially by assigning a part of the heavy computations to an off-chain untrusted administrator in a verifiable manner. As a side effect, this second implementation became not dispute-free; there is a need for a tally dispute phase where an observer interrupts the protocol when the administrator cheats, i.e., announces a wrong tally result. In this work, we propose a new smart contract design to tackle the problems in the previous implementations by (i) preforming all the heavy computations off-chain hence achieving higher scalability, and (ii) utilizing zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) to verify the correctness of the off-chain computations, hence maintaining the dispute-free property. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our design, we develop prototype implementations on Ethereum and conduct multiple experiments for different implementation options that show a trade-off between the zk-SNARK proof generation time and the smart contract gas cost, including an implementation in which the smart contract consumes a constant amount of gas independent of the number of voters

VeriVoting: A decentralized, verifiable and privacy-preserving scheme for weighted voting

Decentralization, verifiability, and privacy-preserving are three fundamental properties of modern e-voting. In this paper, we conduct extensive investigations into them and present a novel e-voting scheme, VeriVoting, which is the first to satisfy these properties. More specifically, decentralization is realized through blockchain technology and the distribution of decryption power among competing entities, such as candidates. Furthermore, verifiability is satisfied when the public verifies the ballots and decryption keys. And finally, bidirectional unlinkability is achieved to help preserve privacy by decoupling voter identity from ballot content. Following the ideas above, we first leverage linear homomorphic encryption schemes and non-interactive zero-knowledge argument systems to construct a voting primitive, SemiVoting, which meets decentralization, decryption-key verifiability, and ballot privacy. To further achieve ballot ciphertext verifiability and anonymity, we extend this primitive with blockchain and verifiable computation to finally arrive at VeriVoting. Through security analysis and per-formance evaluations, VeriVoting offers a new trade-off between security and efficiency that differs from all previous e-voting schemes and provides a radically novel practical ap-proach to large-scale elections

¿Es la tecnología blockchain el futuro del voto?

Trabajo de Fin de Grado en Ingeniería Informática, Facultad de Informática UCM, Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, Curso 2021/2022.Is blockchain technology the future of voting systems? It has never been an easy task to come to an agreement. Dialogue and discussion have been always necessary to obtain support from others so societies can be arranged and developed. Nonetheless, it is when this dialogue and discussion diverts when society comes to a stop. As it could be seen in the last United States elections, political parties, and even civilians, are increasingly questioning the results from a democratic election and the conflict that emerges from it. This has to do with the current voting systems, like ballots boxes, and more importantly automated voting systems, as they are corruptible and have a lack of transparency and traceability, and in a moment where an untrusting society arises, this causes mayor instability. In parallel, in the recent years Blockchain technology and decentralized networks have been evolving unstoppably. Governance systems, financial entities, supply chains, IoT… Blockchain has awaken much interest in various sectors for the unique characteristics it offers, like the incorruptibility of data, traceability, and transparency. For these reasons, Blockchain technology presents as a good option for current voting system problems. However, is it currently a viable option? Or there are other challenges that must be addressed previously?¿Es la tecnología Blockchain el futuro del voto? Ponerse de acuerdo nunca ha sido tarea fácil. Desde siempre el diálogo y el debate de ideas han sido necesarios para ganar apoyos y de esta forma organizar y hacer prosperar una sociedad. No obstante, es cuando este debate se desvía cuando la situación se complica y se estanca. Se ha podido ver en las últimas elecciones en Estados Unidos cómo, cada vez más, los partidos políticos, e incluso los propios ciudadanos, ponen en cuestionamiento los resultados de unas elecciones y el conflicto que surge a raíz de ello. Esto se debe a que los sistemas actuales de votación, como las urnas, y más aún los sistemas automatizados de votación, son manipulables y carecen de transparencia y trazabilidad, y en un momento donde la población es cada vez más desconfiada, esto supone una mayor inestabilidad. En paralelo a todo esto, en los últimos años la tecnología Blockchain y las redes descentralizadas se han ido desarrollando continuamente. Sistemas de gobernanza, entidades financieras, cadenas de suministros, IoT… Esta tecnología ha suscitado mucho interés en multitud de sectores por las cualidades únicas que proporciona, entre las cuales destacan la incorruptibilidad de los datos, la trazabilidad y la transparencia. Es por ello que la tecnología Blockchain se presenta como una buena opción para los problemas actuales de los sistemas de votación. Sin embargo, ¿es viable actualmente? ¿O por el contrario hay otros retos que deben ser superados previamente?Depto. de Sistemas Informáticos y ComputaciónFac. de InformáticaTRUEunpu