Blockchain for Electronic Voting System—Review and Open Research Challenges

Abstract

Online voting is a trend that is gaining momentum in modern society. It has great potential to decrease organizational costs and increase voter turnout. It eliminates the need to print ballot papers or open polling stations—voters can vote from wherever there is an Internet connection. Despite these benefits, online voting solutions are viewed with a great deal of caution because they introduce new threats. A single vulnerability can lead to large-scale manipulations of votes. Electronic voting systems must be legitimate, accurate, safe, and convenient when used for elections. Nonetheless, adoption may be limited by potential problems associated with electronic voting systems. Blockchain technology came into the ground to overcome these issues and offers decentralized nodes for electronic voting and is used to produce electronic voting systems mainly because of their end-to-end verification advantages. This technology is a beautiful replacement for traditional electronic voting solutions with distributed, non-repudiation, and security protection characteristics. The following article gives an overview of electronic voting systems based on blockchain technology. The main goal of this analysis was to examine the current status of blockchain-based voting research and online voting systems and any related difficulties to predict future developments. This study provides a conceptual description of the intended blockchain-based electronic voting application and an introduction to the fundamental structure and characteristics of the blockchain in connection to electronic voting. As a consequence of this study, it was discovered that blockchain systems may help solve some of the issues that now plague election systems. On the other hand, the most often mentioned issues in blockchain applications are privacy protection and transaction speed. For a sustainable blockchain-based electronic voting system, the security of remote participation must be viable, and for scalability, transaction speed must be addressed. Due to these concerns, it was determined that the existing frameworks need to be improved to be utilized in voting systems.

ElectAnon: A Blockchain-Based, Anonymous, Robust and Scalable Ranked-Choice Voting Protocol

“…Gritzalis' requirements are still valid even today. Recent work [18] in 2021 mentions a similar set of requirements for secure blockchain-based online elections. We gathered and presented existing definitions of Eligibility, Uniqueness, Privacy, Fairness, Soundness, Universal Verifiability, Individual Verifiability secure election requirements.…”

“…No intermediate results should be available. Voters should not be able to alter their preferences according to intermediate results [14] [18]. 2.7.4 Soundness.…”

“…Only valid ballots should be taken into account in the tallying process. Invalid votes should be discarded and not be tallied [18]. 2.7.5 Universal Verifiability.…”

A Survey about Fusion of Blockchain Technology in Various Application Realms

“…Real-Time Implementation of blockchain for Government and for public sector applicants Blockchain grounded voting system that affords whole transparency in the election process. It guarantees election is piloted insecure way and ensure 100% accuracy of handling election [32].…”

Distributed Remote E-Voting System Based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme

“…However, we consider that this technology is not suitable for a really secure e-voting system under our current threat model (at least in its current state). The main drawbacks of the blockchain technology are its poor scalability, and the needless computational and energetic waste [23]. Recently, the alternative 'Proof of Stake' consensus algorithm has been proposed to replace 'Proof of Work', as a means to solve the computational problem, however, it still presents serious security drawbacks [24].…”