Blockchain in the Voting system – A Complete Guide for 2020

Blockchain is an inalterable and an easy confirmable system.

Blockchain has a significant potential to be an alternative to traditional elections.

To vanish problems of both conventional and e-voting elections, e-voting can be improved using the Blockchain mechanism.

Smart solutions can be brought to central authority problems in terms of all blocks having all data in the chain.

Also, it is impossible to change the information in a block since it is perceived by other blocks which have whole data.

Blockchain in the Voting system increases the security of information by keeping the entire data in all blocks and removes the need for an intermediary to provide a secure election.

Counting votes and making election results publicly available takes considerable time.

Blockchain solves this problem by its nature.   

Blockchain in the Voting system And Electronic Voting System

E-voting in different areas has been considered for a while by some countries.

The pioneer country in the e-voting process in Estonia which held online voting.

On the other hand,

The blockchain-based election has not been commonly applied yet.

It has been under development in recent years.

There is some research that widens the viewpoint about blockchain-based voting by offering different ideas. 

In the voting process, the citizen’s email addresses can be hacked or manipulated easily.

To be obvious, there will always be some people who register to the system using someone else’s mail address and vote on behalf of them. 

For example, a grandson may open an email address for his grandparents from different devices, and cast their votes.

This method guarantees none of the required qualifications such as security, data integrity, or privacy that an e-voting system has.

For such a system, stealing votes or changing votes is totally possible. 

Another main focus is on, peer – to – peer blockchain-based voting system.

To protect the anonymity of the ballots and commitment of the votes to the blockchain, they propose a unique vote commitment format.

For this purpose, it is preferred to use a structure for chains that consist of different key-value pairs representing the vote itself.

Another purpose is to get a solution with a database alongside Blockchain.

The system is designed to create blocks following the collection of ballots from voters to keep them in a database until the end of the election process.

It has been tried to eliminate the need for a database.  

Blockchain has also been used in areas such as the Internet of things (IoT).

Since there are so many different devices and each of them is processing different data, new approaches emerged from this area.

The blockchain IoT is a hybrid model that uses different chains in different layers and levels in blockchain-based e-voting system.  

Some other work is a one-time ring signature in order to ensure the anonymity of the voting citizen.

Each candidate in the election needs a public key pair in this architecture and adding a new candidate increases the complexity of the signing process and at every node demanded CPU power increases.

One time ring signature architecture does not depend on any trusting center but it provides the authority of selecting a candidate to the government which is the trusting center for the election. 

Blockchain as a service

Smart contracts

Smart contracts are trackable and irreversible applications that work in a decentralized environment.

Once the smart contract has been deployed nobody can edit the code or change its execution behavior.

Smart contract execution guarantees to bind parties together to an agreement as written.

This creates a new powerful type of trust relationship that does not rely on a single party.

It enables better management for realizing digital agreements because they are self-verifying and self-executing. 

Contribution of smart contracts in e-voting system

• Election creation, election administrators create election ballots using a decentralized app (DAPP).

This decentralized app interacts with an election creation smart contract, in which the administrator defines a list of candidates and voting districts.

This smart contract creates a set of ballot smart contracts and deploys them onto the blockchain, with a list of the candidates, for each voting district, where each voting district is a parameter in each ballot smart contract.

When the election is created, each corresponding district node is given permission to interact with his corresponding ballot smart contract. 

• Voter registration, component for a government identity verification service to securely authenticate and authorize eligible individuals.

Using such verification services, each of the eligible voters should have an electronic ID and PIN number and information on what voting district the voter is located in.

For each eligible voter, a corresponding wallet would be generated for the voter.

The wallet generated for each individual voter should be unique for each election the voter is eligible for. 

• Vote transaction, when an individual vote at a voting district, the voter interacts with a ballot smart contract with the same voting district as is defined for any individual voter.

This smart contract interacts with the blockchain via the corresponding district node, which adds the vote to the blockchain if consensus is reached between the majority of the corresponding district nodes.  

• Tallying results, the tallying of the election is done in the smart contracts.

Each ballot smart contract does its own tally for its corresponding location in its own storage.

When an election is over, the final result for each smart contract is published. 

• Verifying the vote, each individual voter can go to his government official and present their transaction ID after verifying himself using his electronic ID and its corresponding PIN.

The government official, utilizing district node access to the blockchain, uses the blockchain explorer to locate the transaction with the corresponding transaction ID on the blockchain.

The voter can, therefore, see his vote on the blockchain, verifying that it was counted and counted correctly.

Non – Interactive zero knowledge proof

Another concept after smart contracts which is not directly relatable but is an essential component for satisfying some of the requirements in building a blockchain based e-voting system.

A zero-knowledge proof is a cryptographical method by which one party, the prover, can prove to another party, the verifier that the prover knows a value x, without revealing any information other than the fact that the verifier knows the value x. 

To illustrate, “Two balls and the colourblind friend”, the ZKP works as follows:

The prover has two balls, one red and one green, and otherwise identical.

The verifier (the friend) is colour-blind.

To prove that they are in fact differently coloured, you give the balls to your friend, who hides them behind his back.

Your friend then decides whether to switch the balls between hands or not, and then reveals one of the balls.

The prover declares if the balls were switched.

By repeating this process, the prover can prove that he can correctly identify the balls, as the verifier confirms that the likelihood of repeated success is halved each time.

A non-interactive zero-knowledge proof, or NIZKP for short, is a variant of zero-knowledge proofs in which there is no interaction between the prover and verifier. 

This scheme is ideally suited for microprocessor-based devices such as smart cards, personal computers, and remote control systems.

It is a simple yet efficient and secure method to authenticate and verify eligible individuals for a voting system while guaranteeing voter’s privacy.

Synchronization model 

Ledger Synchronization layer synchronizes a multichain ledger with the local application-specific database using one of the existing database technologies.

Votes cast are recorded in the data tables at the backend of the database.

Voters are able to track their votes using the unique identifier provided to them as soon as their vote is mined and added into the blockchain ledger.

The security considerations of the votes are based on block-chain technology using cryptographic hashes to secure end-to-end communication.

Voting results are also stored in the application’s database with the view to facilitate auditing and any further operations at a later stage. 

Legal issues which can occur in the blockchain technology in the e-voting system

Remote Voting

They do not guarantee privacy that people have when they cast their vote in a voting booth as it does not provide coercion resistance because of the nonsupervised factor in a remote election.

Family members or a coercer can watch over your shoulder while you’re voting, which could lead to misconfigured results.

If elections are hosted on a website for example it could easily be taken down by people with good hacking skills and the mindset to do so.

People could identify themselves as another person and the mindset to do so.

People could identify themselves as another person and therefore vote for another person and even multiple people. 

Transparency

In today’s election scheme, no method of transparency can be offered to participants of the election.

When an individual places his ballot in the box at his voting district, there is no guarantee from the scheme that his vote was counted and counted correctly.

Any individual vote can be misplaced, counted incorrectly because of human error or simply because the party which the voter voted for could be disliked by the individual which counted the vote.

Introducing transparency in the process of an election would require a new law that would allow government officials to provide the services which allow such methods of transparency.

Voter privacy

In every pen and paper election scheme, voters’ privacy is a key element.

If the information could be gathered for each vote, such information could then leak to the public which would allow for listing every single individual who voted for a single party/candidate.

To satisfy the privacy of each voter, no individual vote should be traceable back to the voter.

Conclusion

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Our goal is to help companies adopt new technologies and simplify complicated issues that arise during technology evolution.

Contact us for the best solutions about the use of blockchain technology to solve the toughest challenges faced by the world today.

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