Electronic Voting System Using an Enterprise Blockchain

Abstract

Conventional electronic voting systems use a centralized scheme. A central administration of these systems manages the entire voting process and has partial or total control over the database and the system itself. This creates some problems, accidental or intentional, such as possible manipulation of the database and double voting. Many of these problems have been solved thanks to permissionless blockchain technologies in new voting systems; however, the classic consensus method of such blockchains requires specific computing power during each voting operation. This has a significant impact on power consumption, compromises the efficiency and increases the system latency. However, using a permissioned blockchain improves efficiency and reduces system energy consumption, mainly due to the elimination of the typical consensus protocols used by public blockchains. The use of smart contracts provides a secure mechanism to guarantee the accuracy of the voting result and make the counting procedure public and protected against fraudulent actions, and contributes to preserving the anonymity of the votes. Its adoption in electronic voting systems can help mitigate part of these problems. Therefore, this paper proposes a system that ensures high reliability by applying enterprise blockchain technology to electronic voting, securing the secret ballot. In addition, a flexible network configuration is presented, discussing how the solution addresses some of the security and reliability issues commonly faced by electronic voting system solutions.

A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis on Scalable Blockchain-Based Electronic Voting Systems

“…It is meant to facilitate pluggable implementations of diverse components and handle the complexities and subtleties that exist throughout the economic ecosystem. The above authors [ 163 , 185 ] used Hyperledger Fabric for private Blockchain, although Fabric is much faster than the rest of the above Blockchain frameworks, but the network is not decentralized in any way. In the vast majority of cases, it is controlled either by a single entity or by a group that has shared responsibility.…”

“…The hash algorithm can only be used in one specific way, and that is: (it is not feasible to “decrypt” a hash in order to recover the value of the plaintext that it was initially being encrypted from). It is a good idea to use hashing to verify passwords, whereas encryption is used to secure users’ data, and it can be decrypted [ 182 , 185 ].…”

“…The selected articles can be categorized into three groups, as shown in Table 13 : the first is the small-scale or organization voting group, which consists of 20 articles including [ 183 , 185 ] that propose solutions and methods for small-scale voting, such as boardroom voting, etc. National voting is the second group, which consists of 24 papers [ 123 , 167 ] that describe e-voting on a large scale such as national elections, but these solutions are not tested in real-world scenarios; some of the solutions are verified formally and some of the solutions are tested by performing simulations.…”

“…Increases in block frequency may improve performance [ 140 , 178 ], while block propagation time sets a lower limit. The related work contradicts itself considering the effect of block size on performance, while [ 24 , 185 ] claims a favorable effect of increasing block size on performance. Depending on their instructions and storage access, different smart contracts may have various runtimes in terms of workload [ 2 , 48 , 134 , 136 , 141 , 142 , 143 , 144 , 146 , 147 , 151 , 156 , 157 , 159 , 162 ], Furthermore, [ 153 , 165 , 168 , 171 , 177 ], for example, reports a performance disparity.…”

“…Redesigning Blockchain: Through this research, the study discovered a few ways to devise an effective strategy, such as to design a new consensus structure, to deal with numerous properties of scalability such as increasing throughput and reducing latency etc. [ 152 , 185 ]. Although Graphchain and HashGraph leverage the nonlinear creation of blocks through the usage of directed acyclic graphs (DAG), certain techniques present as an alternate (other than Blockchain) scalable distributed ledger (DLT) solution.…”