D-BAME: Distributed Blockchain-Based Anonymous Mobile Electronic Voting

Abstract

Electronic voting (e-voting) presents a convenient and cost-effective alternative to current paper ballot-based voting. It provides many benefits such as increased voter turnout and accuracy in the decision-making process. While presenting many improvements, e-voting still faces serious security challenges that hinder its adoption, especially when designed to be run over mobile devices. In this article, we propose a novel remote e-voting model for large-scale elections by proposing the participation of two conflicting parties to ensure election integrity and accountability. Our scheme can be implemented in IoT devices such as smartphones, which we believe can significantly increase voter turnout of the election process. Our proposed work is secure and preserves voter privacy through secure multiparty computations performed by parties of differing allegiances. It also leverages a blockchain running smart contracts as a publicly accessible and tamper-resistant bulletin board to permanently store votes and prevent double voting. In our security and privacy analysis, we show that our proposed scheme is secure against potential security threats and provides voter anonymity. We show orthogonality between universal verifiability and coercion resistance in our proposed scheme, allowing an election to favor one over the other. Our performance analysis and smartphone simulation results show that the proposed scheme is practical for large-scale elections.