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: domestic research experience

The article is devoted to the analysis of the domestic experience of studying electronic voting. The authors combine all points of view on the concept of electronic voting into two main approaches. The narrow approach focuses on the process of submitting votes electronically. In a broad approach, the concept of “electronic voting” includes the process of voter registration, processing of ballots and counting of votes by electronic means, even if the voting itself was carried out in the traditional way). The article presents the main advantages of electronic voting, a number of problems are noted: technical; value; social.

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 Applicability of Internet Voting in Africa

The covid-19 pandemic has brought about new ways of conducting business through the use of Information Communication Technologies and elections have not been spared either. Internet voting is another form of strengthening democracy through the use of Information Communication Technologies. Africa lags in the implementation of electronic voting, especially Internet voting. This chapter applied a critical socio-technical analysis that analyses factors that influence the applicability of Internet voting within the African context. The researcher applied desktop research which included 30 journals to gather data from the Internet and other documentation sources. The findings reveal that decision-makers can partially implement Internet voting in some of the countries in Africa like Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Morocco, Mauritius, Tunisia, and Seychelles. To successfully implement Internet voting, the decision-makers in African nations have to fully invest in the Information Communication Technology infrastructure, provide the necessary security, legislation and carry out intensive voter education to build trust among voters.

ELEKTRONSKA DEMOKRATIJA I ELEKTRONSKO GLASANjE

Active participation of citizens and their participation in social activities is increasingly taking place in the virtual space, the use of the internet and new digital technologies, raising questions about understanding and defining the concept of electronic democracy. One cannot talk about the existence of democracy in society unless there is active participation of citizens in deciding all the most important issues of that society (citizens' participation). If citizens do their daily activities more and more using digital technologies, then naturally it raises the issue of their activities in deciding the most important issues in society, also digitally. An important link in the legitimacy and institutionalisation of this process is the electoral process. Modern constitutional systems base the electoral process on guaranteeing equal voting rights for all participants in the process. In this sense, it is also important to determine the notion of electronic voting as an important element of the electoral process within electronic democracy. If we start from the fact that modern technology is included in the process of electronic voting, which is not equally available to all citizens, then the issue of ensuring the equality of participants in this election process is set as one of the basic issues and the biggest challenges of a modern high-tech society.