Existing Voting System Research Articles

Decentralizing Democracy: Secure and Transparent E-Voting Systems with Blockchain Technology in the Context of Palestine

Elections and voting play a crucial role in the development of a democratic society, enabling the public to express their views and participate in the decision-making process. Voting methods have evolved from paper ballot systems to e-voting systems to preserve the integrity of votes, ensuring a secure, transparent, and verifiable process. Continuous efforts have been made to develop a secure e-voting system that eliminates fraud attempts and provides accurate voting results. In this paper, we propose the architecture of a blockchain-based e-voting system called VoteChain. Developed to support the existing voting system in the state of Palestine, VoteChain aims to provide secure e-voting with features such as auditability, verifiability, accuracy, privacy, flexibility, transparency, mobility, availability, convenience, data integrity, and distribution of authority. The work introduces a smart contract designed to meet the demands of e-voting, governing transactions, monitoring computations, enforcing acceptable usage policies, and managing data usage after transmission. The proposed system also adopts advanced cryptographic techniques to enhance security. VoteChain features a web-based interface to facilitate user interaction, providing protection against multiple or double voting to ensure the integrity of the election. Furthermore, VoteChain is designed with a user-friendly and easily accessible administrator interface for managing voters, constituencies, and candidates. It ensures equal participation rights for all voters, fostering fair and healthy competition among candidates while preserving voter anonymity. A comparative analysis demonstrates VoteChain’s advancements in privacy, security, and scalability over both traditional and blockchain-based e-voting systems.

E-voting system using cloud-based hybrid blockchain technology

With the invention of Internet-enabled devices, cloud and blockchain-based technologies, an online voting system can smoothly carry out election processes. During pandemic situations, citizens tend to develop panic about mass gatherings, which may influence the decrease in the number of votes. This urges a reliable, flexible, transparent, secure, and cost-effective voting system. The proposed online voting system using cloud-based hybrid blockchain technology eradicates the flaws that persist in the existing voting system, and it is carried out in three phases: the registration phase, vote casting phase and vote counting phase. A timestamp-based authentication protocol with digital signature validates voters and candidates during the registration and vote casting phases. Using smart contracts, third-party interventions are eliminated, and the transactions are secured in the blockchain network. Finally, to provide accurate voting results, the practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) consensus mechanism is adopted to ensure that the vote has not been modified or corrupted. Hence, the overall performance of the proposed system is significantly better than that of the existing system. Further performance was analyzed based on authentication delay, vote alteration, response time, and latency.

Development of a secure remote voting system and research on the characteristics of its anonymity

Currently, the task of creating a reliable and anonymous remote voting system is relevant. Existing voting systems either do not fully meet the requirements of anonymity, or are closed from research. A scheme was developed for creating an anonymous remote voting system based on the blind electronic signature protocol and the algorithm for creating an anonymous channel. This paper describes possible threats and vulnerabilities of the protocols on which the scheme for constructing an anonymous voting system is based including the threat of a hacker’s sabotage sending his own or other people's ballots over a communication channel. The presented optimized version of the algorithm for creating anonymous remote voting system guarantees the impossibility of fake ballots or their reuse and also excludes possible attempts to sabotage the forwarding of ballots by voters. Formulas for calculating the optimal value of p the probability of sending a ballot directly to the server is defined. It is shown that the value of p must be calculated depending on the number of voters in order to achieve the maximum anonymity of the participants' votes.

Secure Voting Website Using Ethereum and Smart Contracts

Voting is a democratic process that allows individuals to choose their leaders and voice their opinions. However, the current situation with physical voting involves long queues, paper-based ballots, and security challenges. Blockchain-based voting models have appeared as a method to address the limitations of traditional voting methods. As blockchain is distributed and decentralized, which uses hash functions for securing transactions, it dramatically improves the existing voting system. These digital platforms eliminate the need for physical presence, reduce paperwork, and ensure the integrity of votes through transparent and tamper-proof blockchain technology. This paper introduces a blockchain-based voting model to enhance accessibility, security, and efficiency in the voting process. The research focuses on developing a robust and user-friendly voting system by leveraging the advantages of decentralized technology. The proposed model employs Ethereum as the underlying blockchain platform through an innovative and iterative approach. The model uses Smart contracts to record and validate votes, while AI-based facial recognition technology is integrated to verify the identity of voters. Rigorous testing and analysis are conducted to validate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed blockchain-based voting model. The system underwent extensive simulation scenarios and stress tests to evaluate its performance, security, and usability.

Secure Digital Voting System Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract: The paper aims to propose a new system for conducting secure digital voting using blockchain technology. The existing voting systems face several challenges such as a lack of transparency, security vulnerabilities, and limited accessibility. To overcome these challenges, this research paper proposes the use of blockchain technology to provide a decentralized, transparent, and secure voting system. The paper outlines the technical design and architecture of the proposed system, highlighting the key features and benefits. The system is designed to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the voting process, while also providing accessibility and ease of use for voters

Efficient and secure e‐voting scheme using elliptic curve cryptography

AbstractVoting allows the people to elect their representative and express their preferences. In modern day democracy, voting is one fundamental and most important tool for election. To strengthen this process, efforts must be made to achieve a confirmable and transparent voting system. Naturally, the veracity of the election process is of ultimate importance for the honor of the democracy itself. The online voting or e‐voting system is a cost‐effective procedure, which saves a lot of money and time spent for organizing the election. However, security, integrity of data and privacy of the voter are the increasing concerns in this context. In this paper, we have done a thorough literature survey of the various latest schemes in this context and found that the schemes prone to several security and privacy threats. Moreover, a major issue with all these schemes is that they are inefficient in terms of computation and communication overheads. With this motivation, we present a novel and efficient e‐voting scheme to tackle the security and privacy concerns. The proposed scheme is designed using the concept of blind signature, anonymous channel and trust worthy entities where elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) works as a backbone. The proposed scheme is formally evaluated using well known AVISPA simulation tool, which simulates the attack model using CL‐AtSe as well as OFMC backend according to Dolev‐Yao threat model. In both the cases, all the possible security threats are being nullified by the proposed scheme and results in safe communication. Also, the scheme is analyzed against all the possible attacks that jeopardize the integrity of the existing voting systems. Moreover, the proposed scheme is also compared with other prevailing schemes in terms of computation and communication overheads and found more efficient.

A Blockchain Based Portal for Online E-Voting

In place of traditional electoral systems, the implementation of e-voting systems is widely adopted which still has major problems in the results. Online voting is an alternative to the old paper voting system and today's popular Electronic Vote Machine (EVM). E-voting systems are very susceptible to manipulation issues, such as alteration of election results by hacking or by the manufacturer of the voting system. To solve this problem, we use distributed ledger technology to create a voting application that is accessible to everyone and everywhere. Blockchain, which is the technology behind the first Bitcoin cryptocurrency, has attracted a lot of attention globally in recent years. This paper proposes a blockchain-based voting system that removes some limitations of existing voting systems. The application is based on the Ethereum blockchain which makes the entire system secure and immutable in nature. The presented implementation is suitable for small-scale elections such as inside corporate homes, meeting rooms, and more.

Designing an E-Voting Framework Using Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology provides a stable spot in electronic voting systems by providing a transparent platform for an election which prevents the failures faced by the traditional electronic voting systems and makes it a more accurate and secure platform for voting. However, little attention has been paid to the possible impacts of new technological disruptions on politics and the electoral systems. The main goal of this paper is to design a framework for electronic voting systems using Blockchain technology. To achieve this goal, the paper outlines these three objectives: (1) to explore and identify the challenges in existing voting systems, (2) to identify the methods that could enhance the security and privacy of the electoral voting systems using Blockchain technology, and (3) to design a framework for electronic voting systems that use Blockchain technology in order to address the flaws in current voting systems. A mixed approach is applied in this study to explore the opportunities and challenges of the Blockchain voting system, and design the framework accordingly.

Development of Electronic Elections Systems: A Review

Electronic voting is fast growing rapidly and offers more benefits than traditional paper voting. The use of technology in the voting process has received a lot of attention in recent years. The existing voting systems have several security flaws, and proving even basic security characteristics regarding them is challenging. E-voting system using blockchain works as a step towards creating secure and transparent environment for elections, where the users will be able to view the total votes casted in real time without having the permission to edit after elections get over. The popularity of E-voting system is increasing in countries all over the world, for that reason this research presents a brief overview to evaluate previous national electronic voting systems in a variety of nations, how they evolved and what were their disadvantages before the appearance of blockchain technology. Then we explain the blockchain technology as well as review some of the electronic voting systems that use blockchain technology and present the strengths and weaknesses of it.

End-to-end verifiable cumulative voting without tallying authorities

In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end (E2E) verifiable e-voting system for cumulative voting without requiring any tallying authorities. To our knowledge, none of the existing e-voting systems implemented for cumulative voting are end-to-end verifiable; if there is any bug or tampering at the tallying software, the tally would be inadvertently modified without any voter noticing this. Although there are existing voting systems (e.g., mix-net-based) that could be adapted to support cumulative voting with E2E verifiability, they generally require a set of tallying authorities, which can lead to substantial complexity of finding and managing such authorities in practice. We address this issue by adopting novel cryptographic techniques to achieve E2E verifiability for cumulative voting, but without involving any tallying authorities. We formally define a model to prove the security of our system, and present the efficiency analysis to show that our proposed solution is feasible for practical use.

Radio frequency identification based electronic voting machine using fingerprint module

Radio frequency identification (RFID) based electronic voting machine (EVM) with fingerprint module overcomes the challenges of wired electronic voting. Finger print module is to authenticate the voters. In this paper the system is constructed with microcontroller, Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), RS232 cable, RFID reader, RFID tag, fingerprint module and buzzer alarm. Dishonest voting will be avoided if the government uses the biometric based system. The details of all voters with their fingerprint will be stored in the database. Database is kept in microcontroller. Microcontroller verifies the voter by comparing the database during polling. If a person with RFID comes for second time voting, immediately the buzzer gives sound. The RFID base EVM will reduce time consumption. When compared to the existing voting system, the system in this paper is expected to be fast and reliable. The voters’ details will not be revealed out. For every polling end, the button should be pressed for getting the number of votes polled.

Problems, construction principles and development prospects of the national electronic voting system in Ukraine

The present paper considers national electronic voting system problems in Ukraine, principles of construction and development prospects. Electronic voting refers to a way to exercise will, in which the voting, counting, and publication of the results processes are carried out by electronic means and systems. Most existing voting systems are built on centralized principles and this allows providing certain advantages, for example, high controllability of the system, its reliability, and autonomy. However, hierarchical systems also have significant drawbacks, in particular, single decision center and centralized storage leads to vulnerability to cyberattacks on them. Also it should be noted, that in centralized systems due to the abuse of administrative resources distortions of the results of expression of will are possible. This is the biggest threat to the modern democratic information society. Research, development, and implementation of new technologies of electronic voting, which would make it impossible to intervene and distort the results of the will through decentralization while maintaining all the system qualities for safety and reliability are promising. This article proposes particular proposals for architecture substantiating as well as a basic model and interaction protocols of a decentralized electronic blockchain voting system. A two-level blockchain voting architecture is proposed, researched and verified through physical prototyping. Its implementation will increase confidence in information resources and services (which is especially important for government agencies) will reduce time and overhead costs; make it impossible for centralized institutions to intervene and possible corrupt practices; will increase the reliability of information storage and the quality of services provided.

A Proposed Framework for Fingerprint-based Voting System in Bangladesh

The objective of this project is to improve the existing voting system that will be accurate, transparent, and faster and will ensure a single vote for a single person. Our proposed system has covered all of these issues successfully. This product is affordable by many organizations where preferential elections conducted. The product is a prototype and can be implemented for vast use. Voting is an onerous task for the election commission to conduct free and fair polls in our country, the largest democracy in the world. A lot of money has been spent on this to make sure that the elections are rampage free. But, now- a -days it has become very usual for some forces to indulge in rigging which may eventually lead to a result contrary to the actual verdict given by the people. In order to provide inexpensive solutions to the above, this project is implemented with the biometric system i.e. fingerprint scanning. This is used to ensure the security to avoid fake, repeated voting, etc. It also enhances the accuracy and speed of the process. The system uses a thumb impression for voter identification as we know that the thumb impression of every human being has a unique pattern. Thus it would have an edge over the present-day voting systems. The purpose of such a system is to ensure that the voting rights are accessed only by a legitimate user and no one else. In this, creation of a database consisting of the thumb impressions of all the eligible voters in a constituency is done as a pre-poll procedure. During elections, the thumb impression of a voter is entered as input to the system. This is then compared with the available records in the database. If the particular pattern matches with anyone in the available record, access to cast a vote is granted. But in case the pattern doesn’t match with the records of the database or in case of repetition, access to cast a vote is denied or the vote gets rejected. The result is instantaneous and counting is done. The overall cost for conducting elections gets reduced and so does the maintenance cost of the systems.

A novel approach for discriminating efficient candidates by classifying voters in the preferential voting framework

A key issue in the preferential voting framework is how voters express their preferences on a set of candidates. In the existing voting systems, each voter selects a subset of candidates and ranks them from most to least preferred. The obtained preference score of each candidate is the weighted sum of votes receives in different places. However, most of the existing voting systems assume vote of all voters have equal importance and there is no preference among them. In this paper, a new voting system is introduced to overcome this drawback. In the proposed voting system is assumed that voters are classified into several categories in which the vote of voters in a higher category is more important than the ones in a lower category. Then, an existing ranking method is generalized to rank multiple efficient candidates based on comparing the least preference scores for each efficient candidate with the best and the least preference scores measured in the same range. The proposed method is illustrated with two application examples which prove to be persuasive and acceptable to the election systems.

Measuring the Usability of Paper Ballots: Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Satisfaction

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 secured funding for improvements to election administration. Improvements include upgrading older voting systems to meet new guidelines. To determine whether the new voting systems are improvements over existing voting systems, information is needed on the usability of the older, traditional systems. This study was designed as a first step in addressing the need for usability data on existing voting systems. Three traditional paper ballots were empirically evaluated to collect baseline data that can later be compared to newer, electronic voting systems. Usability was evaluated using the thee International Organization for Standardization (ISO) metrics suggested by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. All three ballot types (bubble, arrow, and open response) produced reasonable levels of efficiency. The three ballot types did not produce different levels of effectiveness, but the overall error rate was higher than would be expected. On satisfaction, voters were clearly more satisfied with their experience with the bubble ballot.