Abstract

Conventional electronic voting systems use a centralized scheme. A central administration of these systems manages the entire voting process and has partial or total control over the database and the system itself. This creates some problems, accidental or intentional, such as possible manipulation of the database and double voting. Many of these problems have been solved thanks to permissionless blockchain technologies in new voting systems; however, the classic consensus method of such blockchains requires specific computing power during each voting operation. This has a significant impact on power consumption, compromises the efficiency and increases the system latency. However, using a permissioned blockchain improves efficiency and reduces system energy consumption, mainly due to the elimination of the typical consensus protocols used by public blockchains. The use of smart contracts provides a secure mechanism to guarantee the accuracy of the voting result and make the counting procedure public and protected against fraudulent actions, and contributes to preserving the anonymity of the votes. Its adoption in electronic voting systems can help mitigate part of these problems. Therefore, this paper proposes a system that ensures high reliability by applying enterprise blockchain technology to electronic voting, securing the secret ballot. In addition, a flexible network configuration is presented, discussing how the solution addresses some of the security and reliability issues commonly faced by electronic voting system solutions.

Highlights

  • A voting system implements a mechanism to choose between various options based on the decision of the voters; voting can be used in political elections, in companies, associations, even in organizational events

  • It focuses on the use of authorized blockchain networks for distributed commercial applications with the following elements: consensus protocol between nodes; Certification Authority (CA); peer-to-peer protocol; common and distributed database whose integrity is maintained by all the nodes in the network; support for smart contracts authored in general-purpose programming languages such as Go, JavaScript/Typescript, Java; mechanism to establish different levels of privacy and visibility of information among members

  • An application executed by a user selects one of these identities when it connects to the blockchain network

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Summary

Introduction

A voting system implements a mechanism to choose between various options based on the decision of the voters; voting can be used in political elections, in companies, associations, even in organizational events. With the rise of Bitcoin and the increased popularity of other crypto systems like Ethereum, many institutions and people, in general, have been gaining knowledge about the key benefits that come with blockchain technology. Among such benefits, there is the possibility of developing decentralized apps that include cryptocurrencies and create the capability of managing industries’ supply chains, financial systems, games, and other industries and scenarios.

Blockchain
Assets
Chaincode or Smart Contract
Identities in Hyperledger Fabric
Wallet
Why Hyperledger Fabric?
Introducing the SuffrageNet Network
Pre-Voting Phase
Voting Phase
Post-Voting Phase
Discussion and Future
Conclusions
Full Text
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