Study on E-Voting Systems: A Blockchain Based Approach

Kamran*, Muhammad Hammad Nasir*, Muhammad Imran* and Joon-Sung Yang†

*
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National University of Sciences and
Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan
2021 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics-Asia (ICCE-Asia) | 978-1-6654-0857-8/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICCE-Asia53811.2021.9641914

†
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Department of Semiconductor Systems
Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
{kkhan.msee20seecs, mnasir.msee20seecs, muhammad.imran1}@seecs.edu.pk, [email protected]

Abstract for hours [2]. Some people even find it

impractical to vote at voting sites [3]. This is a very
The traditional voting system has many flaws strenuous and costly activity.
such as election manipulation, security breaches,
transparency and privacy issues. These issues occur The widespread use and evolution of technology
as the votes can be changed by a central authority in has opened new paths for our voting needs. E-voting
favor of one party when they are being counted is the process of voting through electronic machines.
manually or there can be human error while It provides an improved means of voting through
counting votes. This system puts a lot of trust in the electronic means without the need for traditional
central authority. Also, there is an economical issue tools. This saves the cost of producing paper ballots
due to the cost of security, human and ballot and boxes which are a waste for the environment
resources. Many of these issues are solved using the after the elections are finished. It also creates new
E-Voting system which has been successful in ways of voting, which can be through a government
countries like Estonia that have implemented this provided machine or our personal computers. Using
system of voting. There is still an issue of universal electronic machines also speeds up the collection
verifiability of votes even in the Estonian E-Voting process of the votes as well as the counting process
system. This paper conducts a study of various e- [4]. The E-voting system needs to be secure as well
voting systems. From among the various existing as it should be able to withstand any adversarial
methods, an effective blockchain based solution to attacks from any third-party application.
solve the existing issues of E-voting has been An effective voting system should have these
explained. The blockchain is a database, distributed requirements:
among all users on the network which will help in ● Integrity: Vote must be unchangeable.
the verification of all votes cast without the need to ● Availability: The voting system must be
put complete trust on a third-party system. available to all the voters.
● Eligibility: Voters must be eligible ID card
Keywords: E-Voting system, Block-chain, universal holders of the country and only one vote should
verifiability, Secure Voting, Integrity, Security be counted for each person.
● Anonymity: The vote should not be traceable
back to the vote caster.
1. Introduction ● Fairness: The results should only be available
after the completion of the election process.
Democracy is present in most of the countries in
● Correctness: The final votes must be accurately
the World. The votes cast by the people determine
counted and published.
the head of government which will determine the
● Security: The system should be able to secure a
future of their country. Voting is a very important
vote against potential attacks [5].
role which cannot be taken lightly. There are many
● Universal Verifiability: The election results
threats to the traditional voting system which include
should be available to and verifiable by
manipulation of votes, security and transparency
everyone after the voting process.
issues that may elect the wrong head of government.
Blockchain provides an all-in-one solution for the
The ballots can be miscounted, rejected and
requirements of the e-voting system. Blockchain is
tampered by the third party which is counting the
an unchangeable ledger available to all the users on
votes. It takes almost a week to count all the votes
the network [6]. It can be accessed or viewed by
depending on the speed of counting [1]. There is also
everyone. It is used as a platform for many
a chance of human error while casting votes. Another
applications including crypto-currencies and E-
flaw of this voting system is the economical aspect in
Voting [7]. The Blockchain contains many blocks
which a large sum of money is spent on the paper
which are interlinked in a line formation and new
ballots, voting activity, security and human
blocks are appended after regular intervals. All the
resources. Most of the people do not even go to vote
at the voting sites due to the hassle of waiting in line

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 blocks are available to everyone and cannot be blockchain, permission blockchain and private
changed once on the blockchain [8]. blockchain.
This paper presents a study on different Permissionless Blockchain:
blockchain based E-Voting Solutions and explains This type of blockchain allows all the users to
the working of the best solution that meets all the become part of the blockchain and write into the
requirements needed for a real-world voting system blockchain without any permission. Any user can
in detail. The voting system that will not allow any become a node and also any user can participate in a
third-party to hinder the voting process. The votes consensus.
that are cast will be made part of the blockchain Permission Blockchain:
without any duplication which will be safe from any This blockchain is operated by permitted entities
modifications. Section 1 was the introduction. who can be part of a company or business. They
Section 2 provides an overview of existing works operate a blockchain permission network. This
and the motivation, challenges and motivation. provides the operators to identify nodes that can
Section 4 describes our proposed voting system and control and update data. They can also control which
lastly Section 5 gives the conclusion. transaction can be issued.
Private Blockchain:
2. Existing Works, Challenges and This blockchain is private which means it is
Motivation controlled by a single entity and there is only one
domain.
Existing Works:
Challenges:
There are some governments which are using the
E-Voting system. Estonia has an E-voting system As technology is evolving with time, there is an
[9], they have used it for all of their elections since essential need for a faster, better, convenient and
2005, using the National Identity cards as the secure electronic voting system. Electronic Voting
authentication of the voters. Their Voting system is can include use of punch cards, optical scans and
not perfect and contains some flaws [10]. It is specialized voting kiosks. The E-Voting can speed
vulnerable to high level hackers as they can timely up the counting process of ballots as well improve
attacks the system to change or analyze the messages the accessibility of voting to disabled voters. The
[11]. Moreover, the E-Voting system of Estonia is security of the system is one of the main issues,
centralized as they have a single data center and does which can be, the authentication, anonymity,
not allow universal verifiability. E-Voting systems integrity, non-repetitiveness of the system. Another
have also been implemented in Switzerland, problem is of the technical nature, where there can
Netherlands and Norway [12]. They still have a lot be insufficient number of hardware backup,
of flaws, related to security, in their systems. The E- incorrectly configured hardware, the setup of channel
voting system is still not widely used in many between the polling stations and the election office.
countries despite getting a lot of attention. There is also a problem of educating the masses on
There have also been solutions proposed for the the use of technology for voting because most of the
procedure of voting. The Follow my Vote [13] and people are used to do manual vote casting using
Sovereign [14] show a way to revolutionize voting stamp which has a high chance of fraud and
by making the votes private and the vote counting duplication of votes as well as other risks.
transparent. Both procedures let the users to vote on
their own through a provided application. It would Motivation for Blockchain Based E-Voting:
also confirm their votes and their count. These have
not yet presented their implementation of the voting There are many motivations behind making an E-
system so it is not easy to analyze how their voting Voting system based on blockchain which include an
system is implemented through blockchain. improved system for counting votes, quick display of
There are also other ways for E-Voting which results as well as wide reach to the people. It would
include the D.C Digital Vote by Mail system [15] also reduce the errors of manual counting and can be
and Civitas [16]. These systems do not have enough universally verifiable.
experience as compared to the Estonian E-Voting Use of E-Voting machines will reduce the cost
system, which is why we do not use these as our and waste of paper ballots and the machine can be
standard process. made to make special electronic ballots in different
The blockchain which is being used for the E- languages as well as for the visually impaired.
Voting system is a trust-worthy service system. Use of personal computers for voting will make the
Blockchain acts as a third party to keep the processes hefty process of going to the polling station and
in order and secure [17]. There are 3 types of waiting in line for hours just to cast a single vote
blockchains which include permission-less very easy and comfortable for the voter.

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 3. Most Promising Design election commissions' secret key and get the public
This paper explains the most promising design [18] addresses of voters and their votes. They can then
as shown in Fig. 1. This paper uses the Blockchain as compile all the votes on a government run website
means for casting votes so that the votes remain (or blockchain) where every voter can verify his/her
secure and transparent and the voters remain own detail of vote as well as see the total number of
anonymous. The process of voting is done by means votes for all the candidates. In order to increase the
of the miner who chooses one of many new blocks turnout ratio of the voters, the government can give
and then puts it on the longest chain in the
blockchain. Our paper assumes that the electoral
system is correctly set up, the voting machines can
be trusted and the third party is fair in the conduction
of election. The blockchain can only work properly if
at least 50% nodes are honest.
The main idea of this solution is to combine the
blockchain technology with the double envelop
encryption technique as shown in Fig. 1. We will be
using the permission blockchain approach. There are
three parties in this system: The voter, the election
commission and the blockchain. Firstly, the election
commission generates its public and secret keys
before the election. Then, the voters are asked to
generate their own public and secret keys solely for
the election. The voters send their public keys to the
election commission to be registered against their
National IDs. The election commission then verifies
the voters eligibility. If the voter is eligible, then
his/her public key will be added to the permission
list, else the voters' public key will be discarded.
After the voting opens, the user generates a
message that contains a time-stamp, the candidate of
his choosing and a random number. The random
number is to prevent attackers from guessing the
hash of the message by raising the difficulty level.
The user then encrypts this message using the
election commissions' public key, which can only be
decrypted using their secret key. The voter then signs
the hash of his/her public key followed by the
encrypted message, using their secret key. The voter
then creates a transaction with his/her public key,
encrypted message and the signed hash of the
encrypted message and then sends it to the
blockchain network. The miners then put these
transactions into blocks after verification and after
several confirmations, the block becomes part of the
longest chain [18].
After the voting period ends, the election
commission destroys all the public keys of the voters
which they have in their list preventing anyone from
voting after the time period. The election
commission then broadcasts its own secret key so
everyone can count votes and verify the election
results thus achieving universal verifiability. The
voters can also verify their own selection of
candidate [18].

4. Future Prospects
To increase the trust of the election results. The
miners can decrypt the encrypted ballots using the
Fig 1: Most Promising Design Methodology [18]

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 tax incentives to those who vote and greater rewards blockchain,” 2015 IEEE 4th Glob. Conf.
to those who mine too. The final votes can also be Consum.Electron. GCCE 2015, pp. 577–578, 2016.
sent to the individual voters through sms with their [9] E. Maaten, “Towards remote e-voting: Estonian
vote details. Side-chain technology can also be used case.” in Proceedings of the 1st Conference on
Electronic Voting, 01 2004, pp. 83–100.
to further improve the blockchain by dividing it into
two parts: One for recording voters and voting [10] C. Meter, “Design of Distributed Voting Systems,”
Master’s thesis, Heinrich-Heine-Universitt Dsseldorf,
procedures, the other for counting votes and to 2017.
provide voting results. [11] E. English and S. Hamilton, “Network security under
siege: the timing attack,” Computer, vol. 29, no. 3, pp.
5. Conclusion 95–97, Mar 1996
[12] T. Martens, “Verifiable Internet Voting in Estonia,”
The current voting systems suffers from October, pp. 1–7, 2009.
significant flaws. Many systems approved for use in [13] Follow My Vote, “Follow My Vote Launches
many countries have plainly failed to meet the Crowdfunding Campaign For Veri able Open-Source
requirements of the standards we have set, and the Blockchain Voting Software , Making Voting Honest
And Convenient For All,” 2016. [Online]. Available:
standards do not meet many satisfactory results that https://followmyvote.com/
have become common on modern voting machines. [14] K. Leary, “Blockchain could be about to change how
From this study it is evident that blockchain provides you vote,” sep 2017. [Online]. Available:
a very good solution to the problems faced by E- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/
Voting systems. Blockchain has only recently gained 09/blockchain-could-be-about-to-change-how-you-
attention from experts of different fields for different vote
purposes. This is only the beginning and blockchain [15] S. Wolchok, E. Wustrow, D. Isabel, and J. A.
will continue to evolve and allow overlay Halderman, “Attacking the washington, d.c. internet
technologies to be made upon it. These will provide voting system,” in Financial Cryptography and Data
even better solutions to different problems currently Security. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin
Heidelberg, 2012, pp. 114–128
being faced including E-Voting systems.
[16] M. R. Clarkson, S. Chong, and A. C. Myers, “Civitas:
Toward a secure voting system,” in 2008 IEEE
Acknowledgement Symposium on Security and Privacy (sp 2008), May
2008, pp. 354–368.
This work was supported in part by the Basic [17] C. Cachin and M. Vukoliu, “Blockchain Consensus
Science Research Program through the National Protocols in the¨ Wild,” 2017
Research Foundation of Korea funded by the [18] C. K. Adiputra, R. Hjort, and H. Sato, “A proposal of
Ministry of Education under Grant NRF- blockchain-based electronic voting system,” in 2018
2018R1D1A1B07049842, and supported in part by Second World Conference on Smart Trends in
the 2021 Yonsei University Future-Leading Research Systems, Security and Sustainability (WorldS4), 2018.
Initiative.

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