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

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunoo Park ◽  
Michael Specter ◽  
Neha Narula ◽  
Ronald L Rivest
Keyword(s):  
Computer Security ◽  
Denial Of Service ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Security Risks ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Online Voting ◽  
Election Systems ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Cost

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.

scholarly journals Blockchain for Electronic Voting System—Review and Open Research Challenges

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (17) ◽  
pp. 5874
Author(s):  
Uzma Jafar ◽  
Mohd Juzaiddin Ab Aziz ◽  
Zarina Shukur
Keyword(s):  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Electronic Voting ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Blockchain Technology ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Online Voting ◽  
Election Systems ◽  
Electronic Voting System

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.

scholarly journals Online Voting System - Powered by Blockchain

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (01) ◽  
pp. 73-76
Author(s):  
Vaibhav Sinha and Sachin Garg
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Voting ◽  
Disruptive Technology ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Widespread Adoption ◽  
Effective Scheme ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Voting Scheme ◽  
End To End ◽  
Online Voting

Electronic voting or e-voting has been used in varying forms since the 1970s with fundamental benefits over paper based systems such as increased efficiency and reduced errors. However, there remain challenges to achieve widespread adoption of such systems especially with respect to improving their resilience against potential faults. Blockchain is a disruptive technology of the current era and promises to improve the overall resilience of e-voting systems. This paper presents an effort to leverage benefits of blockchain such as cryptographic foundations and transparency to achieve an effective scheme for e voting. The proposed scheme conforms to the fundamental requirements for e-voting schemes and achieves end-to-end verifiability. The paper presents details of the proposed e-voting scheme along with its implementation using the Multichain platform. The paper presents in-depth evaluation of the scheme which successfully demonstrates its effectiveness to achieve an end-to-end verifiable e-voting scheme.

scholarly journals Secure Online E-voting Protocol Based on Voters Authentication

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 3268-3270
Keyword(s):  
Random Number ◽  
Denial Of Service ◽  
Control Process ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Public Key Encryption ◽  
Privacy And Security ◽  
The Public ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Limit Access

Although there are many e-voting systems present by analysis it is found that they all are vulnerable to privacy risk and weakness of unreliable protocols and denial of service attacks. Here is the need to implement the public key encryption e-voting system. The primary objective of this system is to make ensure reliability, privacy and security of the protocol and voting is convenience to users. As a result of the specification requirements, the system was summarized into three parts: access control process which limit access to a system or to any other resource. Secondly, voting process was done by encrypting voter's electronic ballot before submitting to the server. Finally, the final result was sorted through deciphering the received encrypted information. The System is more efficient than other E-Voting systems, since voters can vote from their devices without extra cost and effort, and encryption ensures the security. A pseudo random number is generated using the OTP principle, is used by the voter for authentication purpose while casting the vote. These techniques provide a secure platform, thus exceeding vulnerabilities of the traditional voting system.

Democratic Governance

2020 ◽  
pp. 256-272
Author(s):  
Leslie Mark Pannir Selvam ◽  
Vasaki Ponnusamy ◽  
Khalid Rafique
Keyword(s):  
Current Practice ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Online Voting ◽  
Democratic Nation ◽  
The Way

In any democratic nation, electoral processes pave the way to democratic governance. In regards to this, a fully digitized online voting system should be introduced, and governments should invest efforts in studying the possibilities in adopting online voting system to curb the issues mentioned above. In that sense, any user should be allowed to cast his/her vote from any remote location, and the processes should be held in full confidentiality without any intervention or possible vulnerabilities. Therefore, this chapter investigates how governments can learn various initiatives and provide funding to further conduct research and implement such methodologies. The chapter begins by exploring some traditional and current practice of electoral system and further embarks into a review of secured online voting systems that has been proposed by the body of knowledge. The chapter then presents how some countries have adopted this secured online voting systems and giving an avenue to secured digital electoral governance.

scholarly journals A Liquid Democracy Enabled Blockchain-Based Electronic Voting System

2022 ◽  
Vol 2022 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Ch Anwar ul Hassan ◽  
Muhammad Hammad ◽  
Jawaid Iqbal ◽  
Saddam Hussain ◽  
Syed Sajid Ullah ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Voting ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Blockchain Technology ◽  
Distributed Ledger ◽  
Liquid Democracy ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Electronic Voting System ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Fine Tune

Developing an electronic voting system that meets the practical needs of administrators has been a difficult task for a long time. Now, blockchain technologies solve this problem by providing a distributed ledger with immutable, encrypted, and secure transactions. Distributed ledger technologies are an interesting technological leap in the field of data innovation, transparency, and trustability. In public blockchain, distributed ledger technology is widely used. The blockchain technology can be used in an almost infinite number of ways to benefit from sharing economies. The purpose of this study is to assess how blockchain may be utilized to build electronic voting systems that can be used as a service. The purpose of electronic voting systems is explained in this article, as are the technological and legal limitations of employing blockchain as a service. Then, using blockchain as a foundation, we propose a new electronic voting system that fixes the flaws we observed. In general, this paper evaluates the capabilities of distributed ledger technologies by depicting a contextual investigation in order to fine-tune the process of political election decisions and employing a blockchain-based application that improves security and lowers the cost of conducting nationwide elections.

scholarly journals Voting over a Distributed Ledger: An interdisciplinary perspective

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amrita Dhillon ◽  
Grammateia Kotsialou ◽  
Peter McBurney ◽  
Luke Riley
Keyword(s):  
Social Scientists ◽  
National Elections ◽  
Electoral Fraud ◽  
Blockchain Technology ◽  
Liquid Democracy ◽  
Election System ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Political Office ◽  
Online Voting ◽  
The Cost

This work discusses the potential of a blockchain based infrastructure for a decentralised online voting platform. When compared to paper based voting, online voting can vastly increase the speed that votes can be counted, expand the overall accessibility of the election system and decrease the cost of turnout. Yet despite these advantages, online voting for political office is subject to fraud at various levels due to its centralised nature. In this paper, we describe a general architecture of a centralised online voting system and detail which areas of such a system are vulnerable to electoral fraud. We then proceed to introduce the key ideas underlying blockchain technology as a decentralised mechanism that can address these problems. We discuss the advantages and weaknesses of the blockchain technology, the protocols the technology uses and what criteria a good blockchain protocol should satisfy (depending on the voting application). We argue that the decentralisation inherent in the blockchain technology could increase the public's trust in national elections, as well as eliminate voter impersonation and double voting. We conclude with a discussion regarding how economists and social scientists can collaborate with the blockchain community in a research agenda on the design of efficient blockchain protocols and new voting systems such as liquid democracy.

scholarly journals Secured Transparent Computerized Voting System performance measurements

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 327
Author(s):  
Enas Elbarbary ◽  
Ghada Abdelhady ◽  
Hussam Elbehiery ◽  
Abdelhalim Zekry
Keyword(s):  
Data Protection ◽  
System Performance ◽  
Electronic Voting ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Performance Measurements ◽  
Avalanche Effect ◽  
Election Process ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Election Systems ◽  
E Mail

In this paper, a multipurpose Secured Transparent Computerized Voting System (STCVS) is proposed. STCVS introduces an improvement methodology to the regular election systems. It could handle electronic ballots with multiple scopes at the same time, e.g., presidential, parliamentary, local, amongst others. STCVS's design warrants well-secured identification and authentication processes for the voter via using voter's digital signatures, certificates. Also, it guarantees voting data protection via encryption. Tallying of the voting counts is achieved automatically; candidates recorded percentages are displayed as charts for the supervision trusted parties. STCVS eliminates counting errors, voting duplication, and vote attack raised in paper-based elections systems. Voting transparency is achieved through the election process steps to assure voting credibility. This is confirmed by a feedback e-mail that the voter receives after finalizing the voting process. In addition, the proposed system saves the huge budget required for authentication devices, Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) that consist similar voting systems. To evaluate the robustness and reliability of the proposed system, performance measurements were achieved by applying the Avalanche Effect (AE) tests. Results of these measurements show the degree of security and the performance of the proposed system.

scholarly journals Secure Online Voting System using Visual Cryptography

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (15) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meher Gayatri Devi TIWARI ◽  
Anil Kumar KAKELLI
Keyword(s):  
Visual Information ◽  
Visual Cryptography ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Hardware Configuration ◽  
Software And Hardware ◽  
Online Voting ◽  
Configuration Systems ◽  
Threshold Decryption ◽  
Cryptographic Techniques

The development of a secure online voting system using visual cryptography is highly essential for present voting systems. Based on the current requirements and design aspects of an existing online voting system, emerging technologies are required in online voting schemes, and these are examined in this work. The emerging cryptographic techniques which are suitable for secure online voting systems are analyzed. Techniques like password hashed-based schemes, visual cryptography, and threshold decryption cryptosystem are highlighted for secure online voting systems. Visual cryptography (VC) is a technique where visual information can be encrypted on the user side, with the information decrypted on the admin side, which can be helpful in allowing participation in voting systems securely and ensuring fast vote counting and monitoring of the voting process to achieve high accuracy while being scam-free. The proposed secure online voting system using visual cryptography is efficiently developed using Python and achieves better performance on minimum software and hardware configuration systems.

On the notion of ‘software independence’ in voting systems

2008 ◽  
Vol 366 (1881) ◽  
pp. 3759-3767 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald L Rivest
Keyword(s):  
Election Outcome ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Optical Scan ◽  
Guidelines Development ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Development Committee ◽  
To Receive

This paper defines and explores the notion of ‘software independence’ in voting systems: ‘A voting system is software independent if an (undetected) change or error in its software cannot cause an undetectable change or error in an election outcome’. For example, optical scan and some cryptographically based voting systems are software independent. Variations and implications of this definition are explored. It is proposed that software-independent voting systems should be preferred, and software-dependent voting systems should be avoided. An initial version of this paper was prepared for use by the Technical Guidelines Development Committee in their development of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, which will specify the requirements that the USA voting systems must meet to receive certification.

scholarly journals Impact of Blockchain in the Voting System

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 117-122
Keyword(s):  
Review Paper ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Electronic Voting ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Blockchain Technology ◽  
The People ◽  
Voting System ◽  
Major Factors ◽  
Electronic Voting System ◽  
Democratic Country

Voting is important for any democratic country. It can be considered as one of the major factors that make a government for the people and by the people. The most common methods of voting that currently exist are ballot-based voting, purely electronic methods, and Electronic Voting Machines, among others. Over the years, it has been a challenge to build a secure E-voting program that provides the privacy of current voting systems while offering a means of accountability and versatility. Using blockchain technology and cryptography we can make the process of elections as open and cost-effective as possible. In this review paper we discuss a new, blockchain-based electronic voting system that addresses some of the limitations in existing systems and evaluates some of the popular systems designed to create a blockchain-based e-voting system.

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