Digital Voting Process via Block Chain Technology

Electronic voting is growing in popularity in today's culture. It has the ability to reduce administrative expenses and boost participation in the electoral process. Voters can cast their ballots from any location with an Internet connection, doing away with the necessity for paper ballots and polling places. Regardless of their merits, online voting solutions are seen with skepticism due to the fact that they present novel security risks. Vote rigging on a massive scale is possible due to a single vulnerability. When used for elections, electronic voting systems must be reliable and secure. However, problems with computerized voting systems may slow their widespread adoption. Electronic voting systems are being developed using blockchain technology due to the end-to-end verification benefits it provides. Electronic voting systems that lack the distributed, non-repudiation, and security features of this technology are missing out. A summary of blockchain-based electronic voting methods is provided here. The primary purpose of this analysis was to look at where things stand with blockchain-based voting research and online voting systems, as well as any problems with foreseeing their future that may exist. This serves as both a conceptual overview of the planned blockchain-based electronic voting application and an introduction to the blockchain's core structure and properties as they pertain to electronic voting. Several of the problems that currently afflict election systems may be solvable with the help of blockchain technologies, it has been found. Yet, concerns about privacy and transaction speed frequently come up when discussing the use of blockchain technology in practical contexts. Secure remote voting is essential for a scalable blockchain-based electronic voting system, and fast transactions are necessary for widespread adoption

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

The Limits of Blockchain Democracy

Should political elections be implemented on the blockchain? Blockchain evangelists have argued that they should. This article sheds light on the potential of blockchain voting procedures and the legal constraints they need to accommodate. In a first step, I discuss potential “democracy benefits” of distributed ledger technology and the legal framework ordering the use of electronic voting systems in general. Comparing U.S. and German constitutional law, I then distill specific normative principles guiding the use of blockchain voting systems. In a second step, I analyze the technical, economic, and normative limitations of blockchain voting procedures. I show that major limitations result from the rules and incentives set by different consensus mechanisms. Moreover, it is not clear whether blockchain technology provides sufficient safeguards to ensure identity verification, the secrecy of ballots, and the verification that ballots are cast as intended, recorded as cast, and counted as recorded. Building on principles from constitutional law, I contend that blockchain technology does not provide sufficient safeguards to satisfy the requirements of democratic voting procedures – at least not in the near future

A Blockchain-based Electronic Voting System: EtherVote

The development of an electronic voting system that would replace traditional election procedures is a research topic of great interest for many years. Blockchain technology could provide some guarantees and fulfill strong requirements for electronic voting platforms, such as transparency, immutability, and confidentiality. From time to time research is conducted to address problems in voting systems. Many research works attempt to implement secure and reliable voting systems, which address known security, anonymity, and fraud issues that might threaten such systems. This paper presents a proposal of a secure electronic voting system, the EtherVote, using the Ethereum Blockchain network that focuses deeply on the field of identification of eligible citizens. The proposed system will be entirely based on Blockchain without any central authority servers or databases, thus improving security, privacy, and election cost. Limitations, problems, and solutions are discussed, in order to make the proposed electronic voting system ideal and ready to use for national elections.Comment: 2 pages, Poster presented in ACM 5th summit on Gender Equality in Computing, GEC 2023, Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece, 27 June 202

Internet Voting Using Zcash

Voting systems have been around for hundreds of years and despite different views on their integrity, have always been deemed secure with some fundamental security and anonymity principles. Numerous electronic systems have been proposed and implemented but some suspicion has been raised regarding the integrity of elections due to detected security vulnerabilities within these systems. Electronic voting, to be successful, requires a more transparent and secure approach, than is offered by current protocols. The approach presented in this paper involves a protocol developed on blockchain technology. The underlying technology used in the voting system is a payment scheme, which offers anonymity of transactions, a trait not seen in blockchain protocols to date. The proposed protocol offers anonymity of voter transactions, while keeping the transactions private, and the election transparent and secure. The underlying payment protocol has not been modified in any way, the voting protocol merely offers an alternative use case

A proposal for the use of blockchain in the portuguese voting system

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceThe key objective of this proposal is to present one of the problems that the Portuguese economy, as well as other European countries, have been facing in regard to the civil society intervention in the democracy: the decrease of turnover rates in the voting system. The main objective is to propose the use of Blockchain technology in the Portuguese Voting System, as a mechanism to counter this trend. In order to understand how the possible application of a remote e-voting system succeeds, Estonia was selected as the case of study. Its architecture, as well as the legal, social and technological issues and challenges associated are investigated in the light of the information collected in the literature review. Considering the case analysis and discussion, a set of recommendations that purpose the use of a remote electronic voting system in the Portuguese electoral system are presented and a critical analysis about the introduction of a Blockchain algorithm is made. This dissertation concludes about the advantages and disadvantages from the use of this decentralized system when compared with a system involving a third-party as the one used in the Estonian I-Voting. The validation is based on interviews and discussions with professors in the area of information systems and law, and also with a contribution of a Digital adviser of the Estonian e-Governance model

Publicity verifiable ranked choice online voting system

Elections conducted on paper consume a lot of resources and contribute to the destruction of forests, which leads to climate deterioration. Moreover, such election process can make it difficult for some people to vote and it often leads to doubts in the validity of counting, in people submitting multiple votes, in ineligible people voting. In several well-known previous examples, doubts in the validity of paper elections lead to the need of recounting and even court battles to decide the validity of the outcome. Having a way to vote online could be an easier and more reliable solution. However, secure and verifiable methods of online voting need to be developed to achieve this. Recent online voting experiences in countries such as the United States, India and Brazil demonstrated that further research is needed to improve security guarantees for future elections, to ensure the confidentiality of votes and enable the verification of their integrity and validity. Electronic voting, to be successful, requires a more transparent and secure approach, than the approach that is offered by current electronic voting protocols. Advanced security methods are necessary to introduce effective online voting in the whole world. Currently, most online voting systems are centralized, which means that they involve central tallying authorities to take responsibility for verifying, tallying and publishing the final outcome of the election. These previous systems always assume that their central authorities are honest. Otherwise, the published final outcome cannot be trusted. The aim of our new research is to propose and investigate a decentralized ranked choice online voting systems, which never rely on any third party (such as tallying authorities), thereby significantly increasing the confidence and trust of the voters. The thesis presents several publicly verifiable online voting systems and indicates the processing steps and stages in the development of a publicity verifiable online voting system from centralized to semi-decentralized, to fully decentralized. By using Homomorphic cryptosystem, proof of zero knowledge and Blockchain technology, the proposed system in this thesis can achieve the following: (1) Flexible voting mechanism: voters can easily rank all candidates; (2) Publicity verifiable: the whole election procedure is transparent and verifiable by voters; (3) Self-tallying: the final outcome of the election can be computed by any individual voter; and (4) Fully decentralized: no tallying authority (or any other trusted third party) involved at all. The proposed systems presented in this thesis include protocols developed on Blockchain technology. The technology that is used as the basis for a secure online voting system is ``smart contract over Blockchain'', which offers a factor of the integrity of votes and has not been deeply studied in Blockchain technologies to date. The proposed voting protocols ensure confidentiality and preserve the voters' privacy while keeping the election procedures transparent and secure. The underlying Blockchain protocol has not been modified in any way, the voting scheme proposed merely offers an alternative use case of the protocol at hand, which could be presented as the basis for voting systems using Blockchain with further development of the underlying Blockchain protocols

Система онлайн-голосування на базі технології Blockchain

Актуальність теми. Використання технології блокчейн набуває свою популярність для задач, де головними критеріями є забезпечення надійності та захисту даних. Голосування на виборах до різних органів державної влади є одним з методів волевиявлення суспільства. Альтернативою традиційному голосуванню є електронне або онлайн-голосування. На сьогодні багато країн розглядають можливість впровадження систем онлайн-голосування з метою удосконалення різних аспектів виборчого процесу. Основна проблема існуючих систем онлайн-голосування полягає у централізації даних, тобто усі дані зберігаються на одному сервері і підрахунок голосів здійснюється тому ж сервері, тому такі системи є вразливими до зовнішнього втручання. Розподілені системи можуть вирішити цю проблему. Провівши дослідження розподілених систем різного виду, для задачі онлайн-голосування було обрано технологію Blockchain. Об’єктом дослідженняє процес онлайн-голосування на базі технології Blockchain. Предметом дослідження є методи захисту даних та алгоритми досягнення консенсусу у мережі Blockchain. Метою роботи є розробка системи для забезпечення надійності та захищеності процесу голосування та його результатів, а також пришвидшення та спрощення, з використанням можливостей мережі Blockchain. Для досягнення мети дослідження поставлено і вирішено такі завдання: • дослідження структури та принципів побудови систем онлайн-голосування; • розробка програмної моделі мережі Blockchain для моделювання онлайн-голосування; • опис роботи моделі та аналіз отриманих результатів. Методи дослідження: методи досягнення несуперечливості даних та методи захисту інформації в мережі Blockchain. Наукова новизна одержаних результатів роботи полягає у наступному: • запропоновано метод забезпечення надійності та захищеності систем онлайн-голосування з використанням технології Blockchain, за допомогою шифрування даних та розподіленого збереження даних; • розроблено програмне забезпечення для моделювання роботи системи онлайн-голосування на базі мережі Blockchain. Проведене дослідження дає можливість виконувати симуляцію роботи мережі Blockchain для онлайн-голосування. Практична цінність у можливості використання розробленної системи для різних видів голосувань: • президентські вибори; • вибори у парламент; • місцеві вибори. Структура та обсяг роботи. Магістерська дисертація складається зі вступу, чотирьох розділів, висновків та додатків. У вступі представлена загальна характеристика роботи, описана постановка задачі та запропоноване використання технології Blockchain для системи онлайн-голосування, обґрунтована актуальність роботи. У першому розділі описані та порівнянні між собою існуючі системи електронного голосування. У другому розділі описана предметна область задачі, визначені основні функції та вимоги до системи, наведені основні прецеденти користування з системою, описано проектування графічного інтерфейсу системи. У третьому розділі обґрунтовано вибір технологій та бібліотек для реалізації додатку, наведено обґрунтування вибору мови програмування для розробки системи, описана архітектура модуля клієнта та сервера. У четвертому розділі наведений аналіз можливості використання розробленого проекту та опис ідеї стартап-проекту, визначення базової стратегії розвитку та позиціонування стартап-проекту. У висновках стисло наводяться результати розробки та досліджень.Topicality. The use of blockchain technology is gaining popularity for tasks where the main criteria ensuring the reliability and data protection. Voting in elections to various government bodies is one of the methods of expressing the freedom of society. An alternative to traditional voting is electronic or online voting. Today, many countries are considering introducing online voting systems to improve various aspects of the electoral process. The main problem with existing online voting systems is the centralization of data, since all data is stored on one server and the counting of votes is carried out on the same server, so such systems are vulnerable to external interference. Distributed systems can solve this problem. After researching distributed systems of various types, Blockchain technology was chosen for the online voting task. The object of the study is the process of online-voting based on Blockchain technology. The subject of the study is data protection methods and algorithms for achieving consensus in the Blockchain network. The purpose and objectives of the study. The purpose of the Master's thesis is to ensure the reliability and security of the voting processes and its results, as well as to accelerate and simplify, using the capabilities of Blockchain network. To achieve the goal, the following tasks were set and solved: • study of the structure and principles of building online voting systems; • development of a software model of the Blockchain network for modeling online voting simulation; • description of the model and analysis of the results. Research Methods. To achieve the goals set in the master's thesis, methods of achieving data consistency and methods of protecting information in the Blockchain network were used. The scientific novelty of the work is as follows: • a method was proposed to ensure the reliability and security of online-voting systems using Blockchain technology, using data encryption and distributed data storage; • a software product has been developed to simulate the operation of the online-voting system based on the Blockchain network. The conducted research makes it possible to simulate the work of the Blockchain network for online-voting. Practical value. The developed system can be used for various types of voting: • presidential elections; • parliamentary elections; • local elections. Structure and scope of work. The master's dissertation consists of an introduction, four chapters, conclusions and appendices. The introduction presents the general characteristics of the work, describes the problem statement and proposes the use of Blockchain technology for the online voting system, substantiates the relevance of the work. The first section describes and compares existing electronic voting systems. The second section describes the subject area of the problem, defines the main functions and requirements for the system, provides the main precedents for use with the system, describes the design of the graphical interface of the system. The third section substantiates the choice of technologies and libraries for the implementation of the application, provides justification for the choice of programming language for system development, describes the architecture of the client module and server. The fourth section provides an analysis of the possibility of using the developed project and a description of the idea of a startup project, determining the basic development strategy and positioning of the startup project. The conclusions summarize the results of development and research