Blockchain Based E-Voting System

Abstract

The modern democracies of the world  have witnessed numerous cases of electoral frauds,  in-house manipulations, violent clashes during the  elections, forgery in counting of votes, and evidences  of cross-border third party involvement to rig the  elections. The root cause of these problems lies in the  traditional voting systems, such as the paper ballot  system, or the machine lever system which are innately  vulnerable. There has been a consistent effort by the  academia to assist the policy makers in establishing a secure, trusted and reliable voting process, since any attack on voting system undermines the essence of democracy.

 To address the challenges of traditional voting  mechanisms, such as cost of expenditure, security and reliability of the electoral process, trust deficit  among the citizens and the government, declaration  of result in a time bound manner and preserving the anonymity of the voter, several electronic voting  (e-voting) systems have been devised, however, there has been a lot of hype around the term blockchain in the last decade. Due to this, several researchers in the recent past have been pursuing blockchain based e-voting systems to help establish a more transparent, secure and trust inducing democratic setup for the  modern society.

 This research report intends to examine and analyze  the application of blockchain technology to the  e-voting process by reviewing some of the previous works related to the field, the technical aspects of  the underlying process, a few global examples of the technique and the benefits this technique offers along  with its challenges. Finally, the report comments upon the future scope of blockchain based e-voting system.