Just last week, we voted again for the European elections. On paper, just like we always have been doing. However traditional paper-based methods are costly, inefficient, and prone to corruption. Electronic voting (e-voting) aims to address these issues, yet security and transparency concerns remain.
Blockchain-based e-voting offers a potential solution, providing secure, verifiable, and transparent systems that reduce costs and environmental impact. Blockchain's inherent features—security, privacy, decentralization, efficiency, and verifiability—can transform voting. However, challenges like scalability, user privacy, and public trust need to be addressed.
Examples like Agora, Follow My Vote, and Voatz show blockchain's promise in ensuring secure and accurate elections. As technology advances, user-friendly systems that overcome scalability and privacy issues are crucial. Blockchain could enhance democracy, but gaining public trust is essential for its success.
Voting is one of the cornerstones of modern democracy which enables people to make collective decisions by choosing their representative among other candidates. Whilst this activity has great significance and value, it has barely changed over time. After decades, paper-based methods are still the most common voting method, owing to the ease of use and protection of voter privacy. However, aside from representing a contradiction to the modern world and its advances, this paper ballot voting method has its drawbacks as regards cost, accessibility, inefficiency, risk of corruption and human errors.
Electronic voting (e-voting), a more sophisticated method that was first legally used in Estonia during the 2005 local elections, was thought to be the solution to the challenges facing the traditional voting systems. Nonetheless, there is a rising concern for security, integrity, privacy and transparency. The quest for secure and verifiable digital ecosystems where free and fair voting processes can take place led to the birth of blockchain-based e-voting platforms. In an era characterised by rapid technological advancement, online voting is a trend that is gaining momentum. It decreases organisational costs and increases voter turnout whilst eliminating the need to print ballot papers or open polling stations - hence it is arguably more environmentally friendly. Indeed, research from a company called Springer claims: “Our results show that paper voting has about 180 times higher carbon footprint, owing largely to the need to transport the voters to the polling stations and back.” Over the years, more and more countries have adopted the concept of e-voting as shown in a 2022 report on electronic voting by country which revealed that more than 37 countries had considered, tried or fully adopted electronic voting between 1982 and 2021. However, e-voting solutions, in spite of the apparent benefits, are considered with a great deal of caution because they introduce new threats; a single successful cyber-attack can lead to large-scale manipulation of votes. Historically, the traditional method has served to increase people’s confidence in the selection by majority voting because voters are allowed to watch and check the process. Such transparency may not be provided by e-voting. Therefore, voters need assurance that their votes are neither tampered with nor altered during transmission and storage. Suitable voting systems should meet the following voting requirements: security, integrity, availability, accessibility, privacy, transparency, end-to-end (E2E) verifiability, affordability, scalability and coercion resistance. Hence, could blockchain-powered platforms be the missing link between voting systems and these requirements?
Certainly, leveraging the innate features of blockchain in voting processes could mean the opportunity for unaltered votes, increased online accessibility, voting transparency and more organized voting operations. Whilst blockchain-based voting systems have varying designs and frameworks, the mechanism of functioning remains similar. The voter applies to be registered by the authorities and after verification by the authorities, the voter receives approval and then requests both the electronic certificate (Ecert) and vote from the voting application via the ID verification interface. The voting application then signals the data centre to verify the eligibility of the voter and, if verified, the voter chooses a candidate and validates it through the voting interface. This is subsequently communicated to the data centre to register the voting action and casts the voting via the distributed ledger. The voting application then issues the tracking ID to the voter, following which the distributed ledger informs the voter. The application of blockchain in e-voting stands to be a turning point since it promises to offer a myriad of benefits:
· Security - blockchain technology offers integrity, immutability, durability and stability. It gives holistic assurance of security and ensures that recorded votes are unalterable. Strong encryption systems inherent in the technology create resistance to manipulation and protect against data loss.
· Privacy - blockchain-based e-voting protects voters’ identity whilst linking their voting activities to a unique identifier similar to pseudonyms. This prevents the tracing of votes back to the individual voters.
· Decentralization - the fundamental property of blockchain enables the distribution of authority, responsibility and operations across a network as opposed to a central entity. This feature is crucial for boosting voters’ confidence in the voting process as there is assurance that a potentially corrupt third party can have no significant effect on the voting process or the final result.
· Efficiency - a suitable e-voting system should allow voters to cast votes in a swift and inexpensive way. Blockchain technology is not only cost-effective, but also saves time and energy by processing massive amounts of data (votes) in a short time.
· Verifiability - a blockchain-based e-voting system enables both public and individual verification. Everyone on the blockchain can verify the election process, and individuals can verify that their vote was precisely recorded and counted.
Although blockchain technology is posed as the solution to the challenges facing e-voting, using blockchain potentially create significant technical challenges that must be adequately considered before adoption:
· Scalability - how well can blockchain adapt to large-scale elections? Whilst there is little worry when the number of users is small, there is a growing concern on the use of blockchain-based e-voting on a national level. Conventionally, in blockchain networks, blocks and transactions are verified by all participating nodes but with an increased number of users, there is a rise in the number of nodes in the blockchain network. Scalability, an already significant issue in the voting process, becomes a problem as the number of nodes increases.
· User identity - to provide privacy, blockchain uses pseudonyms. However, this does not provide complete privacy. Transactions are public and the user’s identity may be discovered by in-depth and detailed analysis.
· Acceptability - while blockchain’s benefits are undeniable, its intricacy may be a barrier to the adoption of blockchain-based electronic voting. The technology symbolises a total shift to a decentralized network, bearing the potential to revolutionise the voting system in terms of strategy, structure and processes. However, it is yet to gain voters’ confidence and trust, which are critical components of an effective voting method.
The last few years have seen blockchain-based e-voting systems being rolled out. These commercial e-voting systems are based on blockchain frameworks such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger Fabric. The European Commission in 2017 funded a blockchain based voting system (called Agora) for Podemos, a Spanish political party, for an in-party election where 155,000 members voted. The blockchain-powered platform was designed to ensure voters’ identities are verified, and votes are recorded whilst maintaining user privacy and keeping the results unalterable. Follow My Vote is a secure web-based voting platform centred on blockchain with polling box audit ability whilst giving voters access to real-time voting progress. The platform has an authentication phase that verifies the identity of voters and ensures their eligibility. After votes have been cast, the platform ensures that each voter’s vote is correct and the election results are accurate. Voatz is a smartphone-based voting system that allows voters to vote remotely and anonymously and verify that their vote was correctly counted and recorded. This blockchain-enabled e-voting platform has reportedly been used by political parties in the US. Some other popular commercial blockchain e-voting systems include Luxoft, Netvote, Ov-net, Polys, Polyas, Votebook, Votem, and Scytl, as the table below demonstrates:
Source: TeamBlockchain
The evolving application of blockchains in elections necessitates the need for blockchain-based e-voting systems that are user-friendly and accessible to all eligible voters. Other convenient and secure means of user authentication such as biometrics and Internet of Things (IoT) should also be explored; scalability is a major concern. Blockchain-based e-voting systems should be able to accommodate a large number of users without a significant increase in cost or transaction confirmation time. Sharding, the division of the whole network of blockchain into several smaller networks, is a potential solution to the scalability issue of blockchain electronic voting.
Whilst the progressive adoption and use of blockchain is not without challenges, over the years blockchain technology has continued to spread its tentacles to several sectors. As the technology evolves, there is a concurrent increased interest in creating and adopting e-voting system based on blockchain. By leveraging the blockchain’s features, e-voting can revolutionise elections and improve voter confidence. And, although blockchain-based e-voting has specific issues of concern, it remains a gripping solution for enhancing the democratic process. However, potentially the greatest obstacle to adoption is voters’ trust in using the technology and also the desire, still to physically put a cross on a ballot paper when lodging that crucial vote.
This article first appeared in Digital Bytes (4th of June, 2024), a weekly newsletter by Jonny Fry of Team Blockchain.