A Liquid Democracy Enabled Blockchain-Based Electronic Voting System

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.

Electronic Voting System Using an Enterprise Blockchain

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.

The Trust in Voting Systems (TVS) Measure

It is essential to democracy that voters trust voting systems enough to participate in elections and use these systems. Unfortunately, voter trust has been found to be low in many situations, which could detrimentally impact human-computer interactions in voting. Therefore, it is important to understand the degree to which voters trust any specific voting method. Voting researchers have developed and used measures of overall trust in technology; yet researchers have long argued that trust in systems is domain-specific, implying that system-specific measures should be used instead. To address this latter point, this paper describes the development of a psychometrically reliable and validated instrument called the Trust in Voting Systems (TVS) measure. The TVS not only allows researchers to understand group mean differences in trust across voting systems; it also allows researchers to understand individual differences in trust within systems—all of which collectively serves to inform and improve voting systems.

Debating Democracy

Around the world, faith in democracy is falling. Partisanship and mutual distrust are increasing. What, if anything, should we do about these problems? In this accessible work, leading philosophers Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore debate whether the solution lies in having less democracy or more. Brennan argues that democracy has systematic flaws, and that democracy does not and cannot work the way most of us commonly assume. He argues the best solution is to limit democracy’s scope and to experiment with certain voting systems that can overcome democracy’s problems. Landemore argues that democracy’s virtues, which stem, at an ideal level, from its inclusiveness and egalitarian distribution of power, are not properly manifested in the historical regime form that we call “representative democracy.” Whereas representative democracy centers on an oligarchic form of representation by elected officials, Landemore defends a more authentic paradigm of popular rule—open democracy—in which legislative power is open to all on an equal basis, including via lottery-based mechanisms.

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

A number of e-voting systems have been proposed in the last decades, attracting the interest of the research community. The challenge is far from being fully addressed, especially for remote systems. In this work, we propose DiverSEC, a distributed, remote e-voting system based on Shamir secret sharing, operations in Galois field and mixnets, which enables end-to-end vote verification. Parties participate as nodes in the network, protecting their interests and ensuring process integrity due to the conflicting interests. The threat model is very conservative, not letting even the most privileged actors to compromise votes privacy or integrity. Security in depth is implemented, overlapping different mechanisms to offer guarantees even in the most adverse operating conditions. The main contributions of the resulting system are our proposal for secret-sharing among the political parties, which guarantees that no party can compromise the integrity of the ballot without being detected and identified in real time, and the computational and architectural scalability of the proposal, which make it easy to implement.

Exploratory Review: Decentralized Voting System Using Blockchain

Electronic voting, often known as e-voting, has been utilized in various forms since the 1970s, with basic advantages over paper-based systems such as improved efficiency and lower error rates. However, achieving widespread acceptance of such systems remains a problem, particularly in terms of strengthening their resistance to possible failures. Blockchain is a modernday disruptive technology that promises to enhance the overall robustness of electronic voting systems. This article describes an effort to use blockchain's features, such as cryptographic underpinnings and transparency, to create an effective e-voting mechanism. The suggested method meets the basic requirements for electronic voting systems and provides end-to-end verifiability. The proposed e-voting method is described in depth, as well as its implementation on the Multichain platform. The article provides an in-depth analysis of the scheme, demonstrating its efficacy in achieving an end-to-end verifiable e-voting system. Electronic trust services are becoming an integral part of the information space. With the reliable implementation of basic services as an electronic signature and electronic authentication, it is possible to build more complex systems that rely on them, particularly the electronic voting system. In the paper, the new concept for developing a decentralized electronic voting system using blockchain technology is proposed. The two-level architecture provides a secure voting process without redundancy of existing (not based on blockchain) systems. The presented blockchain-based voting protocol ensures all requirements that are put forward to such types of protocols including voting transparency and anonymity. This project is aimed to design a decentralized e-voting system. The core idea is to combine the blockchain technology with secret sharing scheme and homomorphic encryption to realize the decentralized e-voting application without a trusted third party. It provides a public and transparent voting process while protecting the anonymity of voter’s identity, the privacy of data transmission and verifiability of ballots during the billing phase. Keywords: Blockchain, Multichain, authentication, decentralized, anonymity

The Practicality of Adopting Blockchain-Based Distributed Identity Management in Organisations: A Meta-Synthesis

Blockchain has become an irresistible disruptive technology with the potential to innovate businesses. Ignoring it may in itself result in a competitive disadvantage for organisations. Except for its original financial application of cryptocurrency, more applications are being proposed, the most common being supply chain management and e-voting systems. However, less focus is made on information and cybersecurity applications of blockchain, especially from the enterprise perspective. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by exploring blockchain as a use case for identity management in the context of an organisation. The paper gives a comprehensive background aiming at understanding the topic, including understanding whether claims made around it, especially blockchain’s potential to address identity management challenges, are based on facts or just a result of hype. Meta-synthesis was used as a research methodology to summarise the 69 papers selected qualitatively from reputed academic sources. The general trend shows theoretical evidence supporting some of the claims made but not necessarily friendly to the enterprise context. The study reveals a promising but immature state of blockchain, consequently questioning whether adopting blockchain-based distributed identity management in organisations is fully practical. A research model called TOE-BDIDM is proposed to guide further investigation.

Moving Beyond the Crypto-Currency Success of Blockchain: A Systematic Survey

Blockchain (BC) is a technology whose value today is estimated by the success of Bitcoin. However, the spectrum of Blockchain applications goes beyond the financial sector. It has displayed enormous potential for revamping the customary industry with its key merits like decentralization, persistency, anonymity, and auditability. In this paper we conduct a comprehensive survey on the blockchain technology, explaining its structure and functioning. This work has analyzed the potential of BC in seven crucial sectors vis. voting systems, supply chain management, the security of Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, intelligent transportation systems, government services, and tourism. Moreover, this paper has critically evaluated the traditional technologies used in various sectors, the problems in them, and the benefits that will be provided by the employment of BC. With its future directions, this paper will help researchers to create and realize new value for various sectors that is beyond anything we can imagine with existing technologies.