Therefore, even if there is a cybersecurity event, the extent of loss is kept at its minimum. Because the API runs on blockchain technology, the communication on the network is also directly between the pairs instead of a centralized body that receives and redirects the messages to each user. As a result, the overall security is much advanced, and the lag is also reduced.

In OVN, the voting size was limited to 50–60 electors by the framework. The OVN is unable to stop fraudulent miners from corrupting the system. A fraudulent voter may also circumvent the voting process by sending an invalid vote. The protocol does nothing to guarantee the resistance to violence, and the electoral administrator wants to trust . This section provides some background information on electronic voting methods. Electronic voting is a voting technique in which votes are recorded or counted using electronic equipment.

Any block in blockchain has a cryptographic hash and timestamp added to the previous block, as shown in Figure 1. A block contains the Merkle tree block header and several transactions . It is a secure networking method that combines computer science and mathematics to hide data and How to Become a Data Analyst Skills & Salary information from others that is called cryptography. It allows the data to be transmitted securely across the insecure network, in encrypted and decrypted forms . One of the gravest concerns faced in pretty much all centralized architectures, voting in particular, is identity theft.

Security Requirements for Voting System

So while a regular database is stored in one location, or centralized, blockchains are stored in many locations spread out all over the world, which makes them decentralized. In this article, we will jump on the benefits and drawbacks of blockchain voting and examine some real-world trials of it. But first, let’s quickly recall what blockchains are and how they work for our benefit. Voting is considered a civic duty for people who live in democratic societies, and it’s often referred to as the cornerstone of democracy. The citizens of Ancient Greece were the among first to elect their leaders through a vote. But rather than using paper ballots, as we do, each citizen would place a pebble in an urn that represented the person they thought should lead.

A successful attack may never be detected, resulting in the wrong people being elected, but with no evidence, even forensic evidence, that anything was amiss. Many foundational computer security problems must be solved before we can safely conduct elections online, and no one is close to solving any of them in a way https://cryptonews.wiki/ that is practical for ordinary voters. Voatz’s technology has already been used by some absentee and overseas military personnel voters to cast their votes in West Virginia in 2018 and Colorado in 2019. Here are a few examples of how blockchain voting technology is playing out in both the private and public sectors.

As of yet, we have a handful of startups working in the blockchain space to revolutionize voting. Before we start exploring these ventures, it is worth mentioning that some governments have also started using this technology to change their “exposed” voting mechanism. For instance, the Thai Democrat Party organized an election for its party leader in 2018 and they used the ZCoin network.

Voter Protection

Ethereum introduced smart contracts that leverage the power of blockchain immutability and distributed consensus while offering a crypto-currency solution comparable to Bitcoin. The concept of smart contracts was introduced much earlier by Nick Szabo in the 1990s and is described as “a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises” . In Ethereum, a smart contract is a piece of code deployed to the network so that everyone has access to it. The result of executing this code is verified by a consensus mechanism and by every member of the network as a whole . On the other hand, the electronic voting protocols have a single controller that oversees the whole voting process .

In their scheme, the electoral process requires the generation of voter addresses and candidate addresses. These addresses are then used to cast votes from voters to candidates. The mining group updates the ledger of the main blockchain to keep track of votes cast and the status of the vote. The voting status remains unconfirmed until a miner updates the main ledger. The vote is then cast using the voting machine at the polling station.

• However, the industry has not yet evaluated and potentially mitigated the edge cases for bringing entire voting systems on blockchain technology.
• In this technique, counter-measurement assaults constitute a significant issue.
• Like Voatz, Agora’s system also allows you to vote from a digital device, although this did not feature in the Sierra Leone election.
• Building trust for the system will require side by side testing with traditional balloting even if done on county level elections before used for state-wide voting.

However, one of the biggest problems that blockchain’s decentralized muscle can solve is voter fraud. While blockchain excels at delivering accuracy and security, people’s confidence and trust are critical components of effective blockchain electronic voting . The intricacy of blockchain may make it difficult for people to accept blockchain-based electronic voting, and it can be a significant barrier to ultimately adopting blockchain-based electronic voting in general public acceptance . A big marketing campaign needed for this purpose to provide awareness to people about the benefits of blockchain voting systems, so that it will be easy for them to accept this new technology.

In order to enhance transparency and ensure the deployed system is scalable, it has been found out that software with open-source code provides the best means. This is primarily done to verify the end-to-end security and privacy of the internal processes. To test this, the developers and other technical people download the entire code and try to break it from an adversary perspective. If they succeed, it means that the system has loopholes that have to be addressed on a priority basis to substantiate their claims. The sole purpose of such initiatives, mainly if they are being used for “mega” use cases, is to ensure several skilled people can explore the code from a variety of angles and contribute to its betterment in the long run. Therefore the dependability and higher operational cost are lowered, and the system is made more scalable and robust in the future.

Scalability refers to a network’s ability to process a large number of transactions without suffering a drop in functionality or user experience. For the first 50 years of the world’s first modern democracy , individuals cast their votes by publicly signaling their preferred candidate. Of course, this arrangement was unfeasible since it exposed voters and increased the risk of suppression and coercion. The system uses an encrypted digital ballot box, which allows users to vote from a PC or mobile device—no need to attend a drawn-out physical voting session. Not only do businesses save money on organizing expensive elections, but this novel arrangement promises faster, more convenient, and secure voting. Voters download the e-voting application and submit identification (typically a government-issued ID and public key address).

As the justice system cannot handle the issue, the bad players can easily get away with it. Greenland, which struggles with participation in its general elections primarily because of the great distances that its citizens must travel to vote, might prove an exception. Things might be different in 2023, however, when Ethereum 2.0 implements sharding. This could boost the chain’s speed to as high as 100,000 TPS, which in turn “increases Ethereum blockchain’s attractiveness for voting,” he told Cointelegraph.

What is Blockchain Voting?

In reality, ensuring or checking every single document in times of voting or election is a very difficult process. The stress is always high, and many people can make a lot of mistakes. More so, this is where the most illegal activities seem to happen as people can duplicate their voting identities or alter them slightly to make it look like a unique voter.

However, the idea of using blockchain offered a new model for electronic voting. Regarding the risk of hacking the elections, the solution may lie in blockchain technology. This type of decentralized system is able to securely verify all transactions in cryptocurrency markets, and applied to elections this could mean verifying that each vote comes from a citizen with voting rights.

The single-owner strategy sacrifices whatever virtues there might be of a multi-owner blockchain. Nonetheless, some companies are marketing exactly this kind of blockchain election, and even claiming it is an advantage. Although the subject of considerable hype, blockchains do not offer any real security from cyberattacks.

As the researchers from MIT pointed out, blockchain security is not yet ready for use in national elections. However, that does not mean we cannot use blockchains to certify elections while the technology develops and improves. And, as they become faster and more secure over time, there is a good reason to believe that blockchains could finally bring voting out of the dark ages. So instead of voters using an app to register their votes, they still completed their votes on paper ballots, and then Agora’s team and a team of impartial observers registered them on the blockchain.

Nonpartisan election observation groups with access and technical skills would be able to monitor polling station result transmission, audit changes to voter file records, or even observe the process of individual votes. Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that symbolizes a complete shift to a decentralized network. It has the potential to revolutionize businesses in terms of strategy, structure, processes, and culture. The technology is presently useless, and there is little public or professional understanding about it, making it impossible to evaluate its future potential.

Great Companies Need Great People. That’s Where We Come In.

While blockchain voting won’t solve all our problems — and even introduces a few of its own — the promise of the technology to revolutionize the American elections system is intriguing. Only one in five Americans are very confident in the country’s election system, as recorded in a poll by ABC News and The Washington Post. Additionally, in a research report on global assessments of the quality of national elections, the Election Integrity Project noted the U.S. as the lowest ranked among liberal democracies. Plus, physically getting to the polls on Election Day is a roadblock for many potential voters.

7. Political Leaders’ Resistance

Although blockchains use multiple redundant servers they offer no additional protection against DoS attacks beyond what is achievable for a conventional server with the same aggregate communication capacity. Though the 2020 presidential election boasted the highest U.S. voter turnout of the 21st century, the country still falls behind in turnout in comparison to other developed nations. To learn more about the ID Verification and Registration steps of our process and how it ensures each voter’s right to privacy within our online voting system, please visit our page onCryptographically Secure Voting.

The corruption of citizens and officials is prohibited from denying an election result by arguing that some other member has not performed their portion correctly . Below is a brief overview of the solutions for satisfying these properties in online voting systems. Although they offer several use cases, the primary one is related to revolutionizing the voting system, as the name suggests.