Chaintegrity: blockchain-enabled large-scale e-voting system with robustness and universal verifiability

Abstract

Blockchain-enabled voting (BEV) systems have emerged as the next generation of modern electronic voting (e-voting) systems, because the immutable property of the blockchain has made itself a perfect distributed ballot box. Further, recent investigations have utilized the smart contract to build a decentralized autonomous voting application over blockchain. We identify nine critical desiderata, such as scalability, verifiability, and robustness, that a BEV system can and should achieve. However, we find that existing BEV systems violate at least one of the nine desiderata. In light of this deficiency, we propose a novel BEV system, named Chaintegrity, that fulfills all the specified desiderata. In addition, to make our system more cost-effective, we also propose a hybrid data structure which combines the counting Bloom filter and the Merkle hash tree for fast authentication. To enhance robustness, we as well introduce the code-voting technique as a component in our system. Our empirical results also show that our system achieves high efficiency and enjoys low computational and communication overhead.