How Can Blockchain Improved E-Voting
The Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) has emerged as an alternative to address issues with the traditional voting system. However, despite its advantages, the EVM also faces concerns regarding security and widespread acceptance. One significant challenge with the EVM is its vulnerability to malware injection, which can disrupt the server and compromise its integrity.
Digital voting encompasses automated techniques for casting ballots, with I-voting involving voters using an internet browser and e-voting involving the use of a dedicated voting machine. Digital voting systems consider factors such as flexibility, confidentiality, privacy, and ease of voting, allowing voters to cast their ballots from any location worldwide. As a result, numerous countries have begun adopting electronic voting systems.
There are certain disadvantages to digital voting as well. One of the main critiques of Estonian and Norwegian electronic voting systems is the confidentiality of a large percentage of the code. Due to several confidentiality problems, the Estonian I-Voting system has a limited ballot format. Elections will be made difficult to voters due to the I-voting centralized power and susceptibility to DDOS attacks. Voters might have concerns about the transparency and fairness of the voting process.
Blockchain is a decentralized network where users preserve identical data replication while exchanging data with other node members. Blockchain technology offers features including data dissemination, privacy, and accuracy. To ensure a fair and democratic conclusion, the voting process must be fair and transparent. Therefore, ensuring maximum security properties like anonymity, security, privacy, integrity, and verifiability in a voting system is necessary.
Anonymity
Since the public key serves as the voter's identifier in the network, blockchain provides anonymity. In addition to this, the blockchain can make use of a number of other methods to hide the user's identity which might be challenging to preserve anonymity in an account-model-based system. In the blockchain network, the voter's data is represented by the hash value, while their identity is represented by their public key. To prevent voter votes from being linked in this way, the cast vote is encrypted.
Integrity
A component of blockchain technology that ensures data integrity is the Merkle tree. Every transaction that takes place on the blockchain is documented in a data structure called the Merkle tree. The Merkel tree increases the security of the blockchain by removing the requirement for nodes to wait for all transactions to be finished before producing a block.
Fairness
In order to prevent voter manipulation, the Fairness procedure makes sure that the results are kept confidential during the voting phase. The voting and counting phases are separated, and a digital commitment approach is used to achieve this. All votes are encrypted from the time they are cast until the election is over to ensure fairness.
Verifiability
Every transaction is transparent and verified by the entire network thanks to blockchain technology. Voters can check the candidates' accounts to determine if the counting process was successfully carried out, providing universal verifiability.
Security
The proposed approach provides protection by keeping votes out of the wrong hands and from being forced. The knowledge (votes) recorded on the blockchain cannot be changed because of the blockchain's unchangeable characteristic.
Privacy
By maintaining the secrecy of voter identities, privacy is guaranteed. Since voter information is stored on the blockchain as a hash, which is the distinct identity of a voter, no individual vote can be traced back to the voter in order to guarantee the confidentiality of each voter.
Uncoercability
All votes cast throughout the voting process are encrypted. As a valid cast vote cannot be changed by the voter, the system is not insensitive to coercion.
Mobility
To access the voting network on blockchain, all you need is an internet-connected device and a blockchain address. As a result, no additional voting technology or infrastructure is required.
Uniqueness
A voter contract, which is a type of smart contract applied in the blockchain system, is used to inform voters that the election process has begun. By keeping a list of the voter as a hash with the remaining vote coin, this contract can also keep track of a voter's voting status.