Blockchain Based Election Architecture using XRPL

The advent of blockchain technology in 2008 has inspired researchers to explore its applications in various fields including health, inventory management and voting. Governments around the world have been looking for secure and trustworthy alternatives to legacy paper based systems, including online voting schemes which are easily accessible and encourage greater voter participation in elections. Over the last decade, researchers have proposed several blockchain based election systems which utilize the immutability, transparency and distributed consensus properties of blockchain. However, many of these systems lack certain properties such as coercion resistance and fairness, which are essential for successful conduct of elections. Apart from this, scalability of blockchain networks is an important consideration in determining the feasibility of use in a large scale election process. In this thesis, we propose a new blockchain based election architecture based on XRPL blockchain which meets most requirements of a fair and trustworthy election process under certain assumptions. We also implement a small test system as a proof of concept to analyze the feasibility of implementing this architecture

Blockchain Elections: Smart Contract Electoral System Design And Implementation

Proponents of Internet-based voting systems suggest that it might offer solutions to alleviate shortcomings that democratic institutions have fallen victim to. This has become especially relevant as governments and societies wrestle with the COVID-19 pandemic, state-sponsored election interference, and claims of election fraud. However, Internet voting systems are fraught with demonstrable risks proven by real-world security incidents. Voting systems are well-understood to have difficult to fulfill and often contradicting requirements, especially regarding security, privacy, and verifiability. The recent rise in popularity of blockchain-based technologies has renewed interest in such systems, and although unlikely that publicly available blockchain-based solutions could fulfill the requirements necessitated by large-scale elections, the availability of such systems might prove useful for lower-stakes on-chain decision-making. This research investigates blockchain-based electoral system design and implementation using Ethereum and Solidity. This research demonstrates that secure and verifiable voting systems can be built using "off-the-shelf" blockchain technologies when privacy constraints are loosened, but that the storage and computation requirements necessitated by their underlying electoral systems results in steep operational costs which likely renders on-chain voting systems impractical in most circumstances. This research identifies which electoral systems and features are most-viable in blockchain environments on the basis of these costs

Satellite Broadcasting Enabled Blockchain Protocol: A Preliminary Study

Low throughput has been the biggest obstacle of large-scale blockchain applications. During the past few years, researchers have proposed various schemes to improve the systems' throughput. However, due to the inherent inefficiency and defects of the Internet, especially in data broadcasting tasks, these efforts all rendered unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain protocol which utilizes the satellite broadcasting network instead of the traditional Internet for data broadcasting and consensus tasks. An automatic resumption mechanism is also proposed to solve the unique communication problems of satellite broadcasting. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has a lower communication cost and can greatly improve the throughput of the blockchain system. Theoretical estimation of a satellite broadcasting enabled blockchain system's throughput is 6,000,000 TPS with a 20 gbps satellite bandwidth.Comment: Accepted by 2020 Information Communication Technologies Conference (ICTC 2020

A smart contract system for decentralized borda count voting

In this article, we propose the first self-tallying decentralized e-voting protocol for a ranked-choice voting system based on Borda count. Our protocol does not need any trusted setup or tallying authority to compute the tally. The voters interact through a publicly accessible bulletin board for executing the protocol in a way that is publicly verifiable. Our main protocol consists of two rounds. In the first round, the voters publish their public keys, and in the second round they publish their randomized ballots. All voters provide Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge (NIZK) proofs to show that they have been following the protocol specification honestly without revealing their secret votes. At the end of the election, anyone including a third-party observer will be able to compute the tally without needing any tallying authority. We provide security proofs to show that our protocol guarantees the maximum privacy for each voter. We have implemented our protocol using Ethereum's blockchain as a public bulletin board to record voting operations as publicly verifiable transactions. The experimental data obtained from our tests show the protocol's potential for the real-world deployment