Volume 6, Issue 06, June 2020 (ISSN: 2394 – 6598)
E-voting Enabled Blockchain
Ankit Garg (Final Year, Department of Information Technology, Galgotia’s College of Engineering and Technology, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India)
Ayush Agarwal (Final Year, Department of Information Technology, Galgotia’s College of Engineering and Technology, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India)
Akash Chauhan (Final Year, Department of Information Technology, Galgotia’s College of Engineering and Technology, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India)
Ravi Shanker Pathak (Assistant Professor, Department of Information Technology, Galgotia’s College of Engineering and Technology, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India)
ABSTRACT: E-voting is among the key public sectors that can be disrupted by Blockchain technology. The idea in Blockchain enabled e-voting (BEV) is simple. To use a digital-currency analogy, BEV issues each voter a “wallet”
containing a user credential. Each voter gets a single “coin” representing one opportunity to vote. Casting a vote transfers the voter’s coin to a candidate’s wallet. A voter can spend his or her coin only once. Blockchain might address two of the most prevalent concerns in voting today: voter access and voter fraud. The idea is as follows.
Eligible voters cast a ballot anonymously using a computer or smartphone. BEV employs an encrypted key and tamperproof personal IDs. For example, the mobile e-voting platform of the Boston-based startup Voatz employs smart biometrics and real-time ID verification. The public ledger ties each cast ballot to an individual voter and establishes a permanent, immutable record. No bad actor can engage in nefarious activities because such activities will be evident on the ledger or corrected by a peer-to peer consensus network. To compromise the network, hackers would need to successfully hack most of the blocks (files with transaction records) before new blocks were introduced.
The Blockchain audit trail ensures that no vote has been changed or removed and that no fraudulent and illegitimate votes have been added. Simply, Blockchain enables the creation of tamper-proof audit trails for voting.
KEYWORDS: Voter access, Voter fraud, immutable, tamperproof.
INTRODUCTION: Free and fair elections are a central feature of democracy. As the world becomes more digital and mobile phones more widespread, online voting and blockchain technology have the potential to make voting more accessible and improve election integrity.
Although at an early stage, these blockchain initiatives demonstrate that blockchain can be used to create secure, online voting in government and private elections. The potential benefits are huge given the current problems relating to election integrity and accessibility around the world.
On the other hand, voting and cyber security experts have strong concerns about whether online voting can be secure and whether blockchain technology is necessary for online voting. To better understand these issues, it is necessary to separate the concerns into two parts. Firstly, I explore governance and privacy issues
within blockchain voting systems. Different blockchain architectures can affect who controls, validates and views data on the blockchain. Examining how these case studies address governance and privacy issues in their blockchain platforms can help us understand the current criticisms of blockchain technology in online voting.
Secondly, I look at security issues relating to the use of personal mobile phones and computers for online voting. Blockchain technology is often one part of the end-to-end solution in electronic voting. Cyber security issues relating to how users access voting systems affect blockchain as well as non-blockchain voting systems. To separate these cyber security issues from blockchain technology, I look at two online voting case studies that do not use blockchain technology. Interestingly, although cyber security concerns are very real, these case studies demonstrate the viability and long-term use of secure online voting,
including the case in Estonia where online voting has been used for government elections since 2005.
While all the blockchain case studies appear to successfully address the security concerns relating to online voting; only Voatz and Votem believe they have addressed governance and privacy issues. Smart matic-Cybernetica believes these issues need further examination and continue to research these issues as part of a European consortium. These differences highlight the fact that blockchain technology in online voting is still early stage and we need significantly more testing and validating before it can become mainstream. It is worth noting that blockchain technology has already moved at a quicker pace than most people anticipated. The current applications are really impressive and it promises to solve some really big problems.
BLOCKCHAIN: A blockchain is a peer-to-peer network of computers, called nodes that share all the data and the code in the network. So, if you’re a device connected to the blockchain, you are a node in the network, and you talk to all the other computer nodes in the network. You now have a copy of all the data and the code on the blockchain. There are no more central servers. Just a bunch of computers that talk to one another on the same network.
Instead of a centralized database, all the transaction data that is shared across the nodes in the blockchain is contained in bundles of records called blocks, which are chained together to create the public ledger. This public ledger represents all the data in the blockchain.
All the data in the public ledger is secured by cryptographic hashing, and validated by a consensus algorithm. Nodes on the network participate to ensure that all copies of the data distributed across the network are the same.
PILLARS OF BLOCKCHAIN: The three main properties of Blockchain Technology which have helped it gain widespread acclaim are as follows:
1. Decentralization 2. Transparency 3. Immutability
1. Decentralization: Before Bitcoin and BitTorrent came along, we were more used to centralized services. The idea is very simple. You have a
centralized entity that stores all the data and you’d have to interact solely with this entity to get whatever information you require.
Another example of a centralized system is the banks.
They store all your money, and the only way that you can pay someone by going through the bank. In a decentralized system, the information is not stored by one single entity. In fact, everyone in the network Owns the information. In a decentralized network, if you want to interact with your friend then you can do so directly without going through a third party. That was the main ideology behind Bitcoins. You and only you alone are in charge of your money. You can send your money to anyone you want without having to go through a bank.
2. Transparency: One of the most interesting and misunderstood concepts in blockchain is
“transparency. A person’s identity is hidden via complex cryptography and represented only by their public address. So, if you were to look up a person’s transaction history, you will not see “Bob sent 1 BTC”
instead you will see
“1MF1bhsFLkBzzz9vpFYEmvwT2TbyCt7NZJ sent 1 BTC”. So, while the person’s real identity is secure, you will still see all the transactions that were done by their public address. This level of transparency has never existed before within a financial system. It adds that extra, and much needed level of accountability which is required by some of these biggest institutions.
Speaking purely from the point of view of crypto currency, if you know the public address of one of these big companies, you can simply pop it in an explorer and look at all the transactions that they have engaged in. This forces them to be honest, something that they have never had to deal with before.
3. Immutability: Immutability, in the context of the blockchain, means that once something has been entered into the blockchain, it cannot be tampered with. The reason why the blockchain gets this property is that of the cryptographic hash function. In simple terms, hashing means taking an input string of any length and giving out an output of a fixed
Length. In the context of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, the transactions are taken as input and run through a hashing algorithm (Bitcoin uses SHA-256) which gives an output of a fixed length.
The blockchain is a linked list that contains data and a hash pointer that points to its previous block, hence
creating the chain. What is a hash pointer? A hash pointer is similar to a pointer, but instead of just containing the address of the previous block it also contains the hash of the data inside the previous block.
This one small tweak is what makes blockchains so amazingly reliable and trailblazing.
ASSETS OF BLOCKCHAIN:
The blockchain network gives internet users the ability to create value and authenticates digital information.
Here are some assets of blockchain:
1. Smart contracts: Distributed ledger technology enables the coding of simple contracts that will execute when specified conditions are met. Ethereum is an open-source blockchain project that was built specifically to realize this possibility.
2. The sharing economy: By enabling peer-to-peer payments, the blockchain opens the door to direct interaction between parties — a truly decentralized sharing economy results.
3. Crowdfunding: Crowd funding initiatives like Kick starter and Gofundme are doing the advance work for the emerging peer-to-peer economy. The popularity of these sites suggests people want to have a direct say in product development. Blockchains take this interest to the next level, potentially creating crowd-sourced venture capital funds.
4. Governance: By making the results fully transparent and publicly accessible, distributed database technology could bring full transparency to elections or any other kind of poll taking. Ethereum- based smart contracts help to automate the process.
5. Supply chain auditing: Consumers increasingly want to know that the ethical claims companies make about their products are real. Distributed ledgers provide an easy way to certify that the backstories of the things we buy are genuine. Transparency comes with blockchain-based time stamping of a date and location — on ethical diamonds, for instance — that corresponds to a product number.
6. File storage: Decentralizing file storage on the internet brings clear benefits. Distributing data throughout the network protects files from getting hacked or lost.
7. Prediction markets: The crowdsourcing of predictions on event probability is proven to have a high degree of accuracy. Averaging opinions cancels out the unexamined biases that distort judgment.
Prediction markets that payout according to event outcomes are already active.
8. Protection of intellectual property: As is well known, digital information can be infinitely reproduced — and distributed widely thanks to the internet. This has given web users globally a goldmine of free content. However, copyright holders have not been so lucky, losing control over their intellectual property and suffering financially as a consequence.
Smart contracts can protect copyright and automate the sale of creative works online, eliminating the risk of file copying and redistribution.
9. Internet of Things (IoT): What is the IoT? The network-controlled management of certain types of electronic devices — for instance, the monitoring of air temperature in a storage facility. Smart contracts make the automation of remote systems management possible. A combination of software, sensors, and the network facilitates an exchange of data between objects and mechanisms. The result increases system efficiency and improves cost monitoring.
10. Neighborhood Microgrids: Blockchain technologies enables the buying and selling of the renewable energy generated by neighborhood microgrids. When solar panels make excess energy, Ethereum-based smart contracts automatically redistribute it. Similar types of smart contract automation will have many other applications as the IoT becomes a reality.
11. Identity management: There is a definite need for better identity management on the web. The ability to verify your identity is the lynchpin of financial transactions that happen online. However, remedies for the security risks that come with web commerce are imperfect at best. Distributed ledgers offer enhanced methods for proving who you are, along with the possibility to digitize personal documents.
Having a secure identity will also be important for online interactions.
12. AML and KYC: Anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) practices have a strong potential for being adapted to the blockchain.
Currently, financial institutions must perform a labor- intensive multi-step process for each new customer.
KYC costs could be reduced through cross-institution client verification and at the same time increase monitoring and analysis effectiveness.
13. Data management: Today, in exchange for their personal data people can use social media platforms like Facebook for free. In the future, users will have the ability to manage and sell the data their online activity generates. Because it can be easily distributed in small fractional amounts.
14. Land title registration: As Publicly-accessible ledgers, blockchains can make all kinds of record- keeping more efficient. Property titles are a case in point. They tend to be susceptible to fraud, as well as costly and labor-intensive to administer.
15. Stock trading: The potential for added efficiency in share settlement makes a strong use case for blockchains in stock trading. When executed peer-to- peer, trade confirmations become almost instantaneous (as opposed to taking three days for clearance).
EXISTING SYSTEM:
Case Study 1: Voatz — State of West Virginia, 2018 Federal Elections, USA
In the first use of blockchain technology in a U.S.
federal election, the State of West Virginia used Voatz‟s mobile voting application to enable overseas voters to vote in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. A total of 144 voters from 31 countries participated in the pilot. The Voatz application relies on blockchain technology to create an immutable record of the votes cast. It also uses cyber security software to detect malware on smartphones, and biometrics for identification and authentication.
Case Study 2: Votem — Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2017 & 2018 Inductee Voting, USA
In 2017, music fans were able to use Votem’s blockchain-based mobile voting platform to vote for the 2018 inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Votem processed over 1.8 million votes without fraud, compromise, attacks or hacking of any kind, marking it the largest use of online voting using blockchain technology to date. The Votem system was recently used for the 2018 Inductee Vote.
Case Study 3: Smartmatic-Cybernetica — Utah Republican Party, 2016 Presidential Candidate Election, USA
Smartmatic-Cybernetica delivered the world’s first online election using blockchain technology for the Utah Republican party caucus in 2016. Nearly 90% of
voters registered to vote online. The platform enabled 24,486 voters.
PROPOSED SYSTEM:
In ideal condition as occurs with paper ballot voting, information about whom the voter voted is kept secret.
This information is not even known to the election commission. This security aspect is very central to the electronic voting system. The system should be secure enough that no one should be able to know whom the voter voted for and tamper with it at later stages. Also, there should be efforts to ensure the anonymity of the voter. To maintain voting data confidentiality, trusted third party(TTP) can be used. TTP acts as an agent between the voter and the election commission to authenticate the voter to vote during elections.
Without TTP, it is difficult to incorporate security and data confidentiality.
BEFORE VOTING: The election commission should provide a user interface to the voter to express his intention for voting. The voter can be identified with any of the unique identification numbers assigned by the election commission. This identification number must be used consistently throughout the process. In the registration process, the voter submits a secret message. As a response to the secret message, the client site web page generates a unique random reference number to the voter which has to be noted for future reference during voting.
An internally hash secret message and reference number is generated and stored in the election commission database. It’s important that voter not share this secret message and reference
Fig 1: Before Voting
Number with the election commission. Otherwise, the election commission writes to get to know who voted for whom and potentially manipulate the whole voting process at later stages of voting.
DURING VOTING: In the real world, voting happens during the stipulated period. The same procedure is followed here. However, the duration of voting can be extended. During voting, the voter has to submit the same secret message and reference number that has been generated during voter registration to the trusted third party. Trusted third party has to send the message hash to the election commission to verify that the voter is a valid voter.
Upon verification, the election commission returns the validity of the voter to a trusted third party.
A voter identified as valid will be taken to the voting page. There, a list of candidates will be shown based on constituency. During this process, a trusted third party generates a public key for the voter using the multi-chain network and stores this information against the hash of the secret message and reference number of the voter. The same is depicted in above.
There are cases where a voter might try to vote multiple times for the same contestant or for the multiple contestants. In either case of the system guards against such malicious voting. This safeguarding is made possible in a multi-chain by restricting the number of transactions between 2 parties to one. Hence, even if the voter does more than one transaction/votes, those will be invalidated by multi-chain.
AFTER VOTING: Since it is an electronic voting system, reports can be generated in real time.
However, the real time report of who is leading and who is lagging should not be made public as it might affect public sentiment and could bias to a particular party or candidate.
After the voting completeness, detailed report about a candidate’s results party-wise results, constituency results etc. can be easily prepared using any BI tool b coming data from multi-chain and data stored in Election Commission records.
dApps: The Ultimate Open Source Revolution The dApp concept is still in its nascent stage.
Explaining the same in a single line is tough because no
a specific definition seems to fit all the attributes that make an application a decentralized app. As dApps, an application is required to exhibit the following four characteristics:
1. Open Source: The first and foremost attribute is that such apps should make their core source code available to everyone. As the core characteristic of dApps is autonomy and unanimous consensus, essentially the changes must be decided by all or the majority of the users. Also, the code should be available to everyone for checking out.
2. Decentralized Nature: As the name suggests, decentralized applications store everything on a decentralized blockchain or any cryptographic technology to save the app from perils of centralized authority and emphasize on autonomous nature.
3. Incentivization: As the app is based on the decentralized blockchain, the validators of the records on the network must be rewarded/incentivized with cryptographic tokens or any form of digital asset that has value.
4. Algorithm: Decentralized app needs to have a consensus mechanism that portrays proof of value in the cryptographic system.
Essentially, this endows value to the cryptographic token and creates a consensus protocol that users agree upon to generate valuable crypto tokens.
Fig 2: During Voting
RESULT ANALYSIS: E-voting is still a controversial topic within both political and scientific circles. Despite the existence of a few very good examples, most of which are still in use; many more attempts were either failed to provide the security and privacy features of a traditional election or have serious usability and scalability issues. On the contrary, blockchain-based e-voting solutions, including the one we have implemented using the smart contracts and the Ethereum network, address (or may address with relevant modifications) almost all of the security concerns, like privacy of voters, integrity, verification and non-repudiation of votes, and transparency of counting. Yet, there are also some properties that cannot be addressed solely using the blockchain, for example authentication of voters (on the personal level, not on the account level) requires additional mechanisms to be integrated, such as use of biometric factors.
CONCLUSION: In this project, we introduced a blockchain-based electronic voting system that utilizes smart contracts to enable secure and cost-efficient election while guaranteeing voters privacy. We have shown that blockchain technology offers a new possibility to overcome the limitations and adoption barriers of electronic voting systems which ensures the election security and integrity and lays the ground for transparency. Using an Ethereum private blockchain, it is possible to send hundreds of transactions per Second onto the blockchain, utilizing every aspect of the smart contract to ease the load on the blockchain.
For countries of greater size, some additional measures would be needed to support greater throughput of
Transactions per second.
In future to make the Voting application more secure we would like to add more authentication systems like biometrics, face ID and other authentication units.
This way we can provide more security and ensure that the vote is being casted by the voter themselves.
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