Abstract
Voting is one of the most fundamental aspects of democracy. Over the past few decades, voting methods around the world have expanded from traditional paper ballot systems to electronic voting (e-voting), in which votes are written directly to computer memory. Like any computer system, voting machines are susceptible to technical vulnerabilities that open up opportunities for hackers to tamper with votes, causing the use of electronic voting technology to raise concerns about ballot security. We describe how electronic voting can be supported by blockchain technology to ensure voter secrecy, vote correctness, and equal voting rights. In this paper, we present a system using two separate blockchains, each with separate transactions and consensus algorithms. We describe a prototype implementation that validates our ideas by executing several proof-of-concept simulations of a range of voting scenarios.
Highlights
Voting is one of the most fundamental aspects of democracy.[1]
Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) has a lot of overhead in its protocol, and we considered using the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA),[30] which reduces the amount of communication significantly by creating overlapping subsets of servers that participate in consensus among themselves
We asked the question: in what way can an electronic voting process provide election integrity while maintaining voter secrecy? The proposed dual-chain blockchain voting architecture and the accompanying consensus algorithm are an answer to that question, and we demonstrate, through a proof-of-concept, that all design objectives are met
Summary
Voting is one of the most fundamental aspects of democracy.[1]. Over the past few decades, voting methods around the world have expanded from traditional paper ballot systems to electronic voting (e-voting), in which votes are written directly to computer memory. Many voters distrust technology out of fear that it might be tampered with To address such concerns, and to ensure confidence in election outcomes, it is important to design and build systems that leave a voter-verifiable audit trail.[8] Several approaches have been proposed. Voters inspect the printout, which is displayed behind a transparent screen, to make sure that it agrees with the selections that were made electronically, and presses a button if the paper ballot is correct It is dropped automatically into a ballot box.[9] Another approach proposes optical-scan machines, in which forms are filled out by hand, and scanned and counted by machine. We ask the following research question: in what way can an electronic voting process provide election integrity while maintaining voter secrecy?
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