Demystifying Democracy: Incentivizing Blockchain Voting Technology for an enriched Electoral System

Abstract

Online voting is one of the new, upcoming alternatives to the traditional systems like Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) and age-old ballot paper. Centralized online voting systems are vulnerable to a plethora of problems. Blockchain, with its characteristics, solves many of the problems faced in online voting and traditional systems. Blockchain is immutable i.e. after a vote is cast, it cannot be undone, and it is decentralized and distributed and therefore there is no central authority over the voting system. These characteristics of Blockchain ensure transparency in the election. The paper involves the concept of Blockchain technology and its application in the field of Electronic Voting. The paper proposes a system that implements online voting with an underlying Blockchain system. The proposed system can be implemented to provide services to medium-scale and large-scale corporations. The system has been tested and deployed on the Rinkeby test network, using Ethereum as a framework to develop smart contracts using Solidity. This system can conduct multiple elections simultaneously. This paper also contains a detailed analysis of the operating expenditure in the form of graphs which were tested in several elections. This system has been tested for scalability, efficiency, and usability according to the requirements.