Going from bad to worse: from Internet voting to blockchain voting

Abstract

Voters are understandably concerned about election security. News reports of possible election interference by foreign powers, of unauthorized voting, of voter disenfranchisement, and of technological failures call into question the integrity of elections worldwide. This article examines the suggestions that “voting over the Internet” or “voting on the blockchain” would increase election security, and finds such claims to be wanting and misleading. While current election systems are far from perfect, Internet- and blockchain-based voting would greatly increase the risk of undetectable, nation-scale election failures. Online voting may seem appealing: voting from a computer or smartphone may seem convenient and accessible. However, studies have been inconclusive, showing that online voting may have little to no effect on turnout in practice, and it may even increase disenfranchisement. More importantly, given the current state of computer security, any turnout increase derived from Internet- or blockchain-based voting would come at the cost of losing meaningful assurance that votes have been counted as they were cast, and not undetectably altered or discarded. This state of affairs will continue as long as standard tactics such as malware, zero day, and denial-of-service attacks continue to be effective. This article analyzes and systematizes prior research on the security risks of online and electronic voting, and shows that not only do these risks persist in blockchain-based voting systems, but blockchains may introduce ‘additional’ problems for voting systems. Finally, we suggest questions for critically assessing security risks of new voting system proposals.

A Scalable Implementation of Anonymous Voting over Ethereum Blockchain

“…Park, M. Specter, N. Narula, and R.L. Rivest [12] analyze and systematize prior research on the security risks of online and electronic voting, and show that, not only do these risks persist in blockchain-based voting systems, but blockchains may introduce 'additional' problems for voting systems.…”

“…The tallying is not possible if one or more registered voters fail to send their encrypted voting values. This is because Equation (12), which is used to retrieve the encrypted tally value, depends on Proposition 1, which requires that all registered voters send their encrypted voting values. In reality, we may have this failure more often than not.…”

Sharing secured data on peer-to-peer applications using attribute-based encryption

“…There are a lot of researches working on blockchain-based voting electronic system (Adiputra et al, 2018;Ayed, 2017;Fusco et al, 2018;Hjalmarsson et al, 2018;Khan et al, 2018;Kshetri & Voas, 2018;Pawlak et al, 2018;Wu, 2017;Yu et al, 2018) which enable a level of fairness and security as a voting system requires. However, there are some recent discoveries (Park et al, 2021;Specter et al, 2020) discussing the vulnerabilities of an electronic voting system using blockchain and mobile applications. However, we still decided to use a blockchain because it has an incentive scheme to motivate users to stay alive and contribute to the network.…”

How Human Factors Can Help Preserve Democracy in the Age of Pandemics

“…This makes Internet voting extremely complex from a security standpoint. While internet voting has been implemented successfully in several countries, such as Switzerland (Germann & Serdült, 2017) and Estonia (Vassil et al, 2016), and new internet voting security schemes are constantly being proposed (e.g., Kumar et al, 2020;Shakiba et al, 2017), some of the leading security researchers in the United States believe that it may be nearly impossible to field a fully secure and auditable internet voting system (Park et al, 2020).…”