A Survey on Feasibility and Suitability of Blockchain Techniques for the E-Voting Systems

Abstract

In the second decade of the 21st century, blockchain definitely became one of the most trending computational technologies. This research aims to question the feasibility and suitability of using blockchain technology within e-voting systems, regarding both technical and non-technical aspects. In today's world, although the course of this spreading is considerably slow, several countries already use means of e-voting due to many social and economic reasons, which we further investigated. Nevertheless, the number of countries offering various e-government solutions, apart from e-voting, is significantly high. E-voting systems, naturally, require much more attention and assurance regarding potential security and anonymity issues, since voting is one of the few extremely critical governmental processes. Nevertheless, e-voting is not purely a governmental service, but many companies and nonprofit organizations would benefit the cost-efficiency, scalability, remote accessibility, and ease of use that it provides. Blockchain technology is claimed to be able to address some, obviously not all, important security concerns, including anonymity, confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation. The analysis results presented in this article mostly confirm these claims. and valid changes) could be provided during the election time. This should be implemented with a supporting consensus protocol. Security is further discussed in the following parts. B. Social AspectsApplications involving e-voting and the Blockchain technology have big social impacts, too. These impacts can further be listed as the value obtained from the provided ease of use and the people's perception of trust to these so-called "hitech" systems. Generally, the e-Government services enabled wider, easier, and faster access to the government services for the people, including the ones living in remote settlements and the ones who are very busy and/or mobile. So that it can be seen as a powerful tool that reinforces the government-citizen relationships [21]. While the e-Government itself is not directly related to the democracy, the concept of e-voting extends the e-Government to provide means of democracy, called e-Democracy. 132 applications. While this mechanism ensures the integrity and authentication of the user/voter accounts, authenticating the users themselves remains as an open problem. E. Comparison with AlternativesWhile there are hundreds of different e-Government applications and services, throughout the world, we cannot claim the same for e-voting systems, there aren't many to compare. Even so, we compared the distributed model of the blockchain scheme with centralized solutions, mostly referring to the Estonia model, which is one of the few successful applications so far.Since the application in Estonia is a full off-the-shelf solution, a blockchain based variation shall not totally replace all the methods used in parts of that system. For example, a blockchain based solution itself would not provide a brandnew personal ID authentication mechan...

Peace engineering: The contribution of blockchain systems to the e-voting process

“…Based on our interviews, blockchain technology can increase security. The security aspects include encryption, transparency, confidentiality, and trust ( Çabuk et al., 2020 ). Indeed, the use of blockchain as a security tool in the voting process could contribute to reducing hackers’ attacks ( Hou, 2017 ), as encrypted data are stored securely ( Kochovski et al., 2019 ).…”

“…Indeed, participation could present another paradox, as some experts consider that the transparency offered by blockchain could enhance the level of participation, whereas others consider that traceability could be a barrier to adopting such a technology. In previous research, the social impact of blockchain technology was examined in terms of providing easier and better access to governmental services, including voting ( Çabuk et al., 2020 ). In this case, a blockchain could be considered an innovative tool for improving the social relationship between citizens and state.…”

“…Sovereign and Boulé use a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm as a consensus protocol. StakeWeightedVoting and Sovereign are open sources, so users may trust these systems because they can see the code ( Çabuk et al., 2020 ). New and emerging blockchain systems based on Crypto-voting focus on confidentiality and anonymity, such as Zcash1, a public blockchain system that implements a system for privacy protection.…”

“…Agora is a voting platform for digital democracy based on a public blockchain and a sharing mechanism that protects the voter's privacy; this system was applied in 2018 as a test in elections in Sierra Leone. The concept of digital democracy is the main focus of the Coalichain project, which attempts to create an ecosystem with interactions between voters and representatives ( Çabuk et al., 2020 ). A crypto-voting system uses a permissioned blockchain and can therefore grant control while maintaining anonymity and confidentiality ( Helliar et al., 2020 ).…”

Blockchain for Electronic Voting System—Review and Open Research Challenges

“…Voting is a new phase of blockchain technology; in this area, the researchers are trying to leverage benefits such as transparency, secrecy, and non-repudiation that are essential for voting applications [ 14 ]. With the usage of blockchain for electronic voting applications, efforts such as utilizing blockchain technology to secure and rectify elections have recently received much attention [ 15 ].…”