A Review on Distributed Blockchain Technology for E-voting Systems

Abstract

Election is an important event in all countries. Conventional voting suffers many issues, such as cost of time and efforts needed for tallying and counting results, cost in papers, arrangements and all that it takes for a voting process to be achieved. Many countries such as Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Namibia, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Switzerland, the UK, Venezuela and the Philippines considered online e-voting systems, but the traditional e-voting systems suffer a lack of trust, it is not known if a vote is counted correctly, tampered or not. The voter has no guarantee that his/her vote is considered as they voted in elections, it’s a lack of transparency. A solution is e-voting systems based on blockchain (sometimes referred as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)) has now turned to be promising for what properties it offer, such as, privacy, security, transparency, accuracy, decentralization in which no central control exist, and most of all, creates an immutable system, where citizens are allowed to vote from their location by using digital devices (smart phones, computers, electronic voting machines). Also, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many technology applications are heading towards systems with all these properties, at the same time, maintaining social distancing. This review introduced many different ideas for implementing e-voting systems based on Blockchain and how the users (voters and candidates) interact with the system showing the voting process from the first step of registration to authentication till showing the final results. At the end of this review we will illustrate a table that contain all mechanisms used in the papers involved that covers the most important requirements needed for every e-voting system based on blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).