Privacy-Preserving E-Voting System Supporting Score Voting Using Blockchain

Abstract

With the advancement of cyber threats, blockchain technology has evolved to have a significant role in providing secure and reliable decentralized applications. One of these applications is a remote voting system that allow voters to participate in elections remotely. This work proposes a privacy-preserving e-voting system supporting score voting using blockchain technology. The main challenge with score voting compared to the regular yes/no voting approach is that a voter is allowed to assign a score from a defined range for each candidate. To preserve privacy, votes shall be encrypted before submission to the Blockchain, however, a malicious voter can modify the score value before encrypting it to manipulate the elections result for the favor of a certain candidate. To address this challenge, the proposed scheme allows voters to first prove that the submitted score lies in the predefined range before the vote is added to the Blockchain to ensure fairness of the election. The performance of our scheme is evaluated against a set of comprehensive experiments designed to determine optimal bounds for workload and transaction send rates and measure the impact of exceeding these bounds on critical performance metrics. The results of these simulations and their implications therefore indicate that the proposed scheme is secure while being able to handle up to 10,000 transactions at a time.