Efficient, Coercion-free and Universally Verifiable Blockchain-based Voting

Abstract

Most electronic voting systems today satisfy the basic requirements of privacy, unreusability, eligibility and fairness in a natural and rather straightforward way. However, receipt-freeness, incoercibility and universal verifiability are much harder to implement and in many cases they require a large amount of computation and communication overhead. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based voting system which achieves all the properties expected from secure elections without requiring too much from the voter. Coercion resistance and receipt-freeness are ensured by means of a randomizer token – a tamper-resistance source of randomness which acts as a black box in constructing the ballot for the user. Universal verifiability is ensured by the append-only structure of the blockchain, thus minimizing the trust placed in election authorities. Additionally, tallying the votes has linear overhead, hence our system is scalable and practical for large scale elections.