First off, I’d like to address the research question by saying that one of the most challenging aspects of computer-assisted voting is balancing the seemingly contradictory requirements of privacy and verifiability. On the one hand, privacy requires that a vote cannot be traced back to a voter from the result, whereas verifiability requires that a voter can trace the effect of her vote on the result. This can be addressed by employing a variety of privacy-enhancing cryptographic primitives that also provide verifiability. As more and more refined voting systems were proposed, understanding of first privacy and then verifiability in voting grew, and notions of privacy and verifiability in voting became increasingly refined. This has resulted in a number of verifiable systems that use cryptographic primitives to ensure different types of privacy.
However, the corresponding privacy and verifiability claims are rarely independently verified. Claims have been invalidated frequently enough when investigated to warrant a cautious approach to them. A plethora of concepts, primitives, and proposed solutions claiming to achieve both privacy and verifiability form an intriguing but complex landscape.
Benefits
Electronic voting technology is becoming more popular in our modern society. It has the potential to reduce organizational costs while increasing voter turnout. It eliminates the need to print ballots or open polling stations because voters can vote from anywhere with an Internet connection. Also in the long term, expenses are expected to decrease. Results can be reported and published faster
Despite these advantages, online voting solutions are viewed with caution because they introduce new risks. A single flaw can result in large-scale vote manipulation.
When used in elections, electronic voting systems must be legitimate, accurate, safe, and convenient.
Nonetheless, adoption may be hampered by potential issues with electronic voting systems. Blockchain technology was developed to address these issues and provides decentralized nodes for electronic voting. It is used to create electronic voting systems primarily due to the benefits of end-to-end verification. With distributed, non-repudiation, and security protection features, this technology is an excellent replacement for traditional electronic voting solutions.
The use of technology has become important at this point in helping to meet human needs. Due to the increasing use of technology, new challenges are brought in the process of democracy as most people today don’t trust their governments, making elections very important in a modern democracy. Elections have great importance in determining who will rule a nation or an organization, or it can be said as it is an event that decides the fate of any nation.
In a modern democracy, elections are very important, but large sections of society around the world do not trust their election system which is a major concern for democracy.
Even the world’s largest democracies like India, United States, still suffer from a flawed electoral system. Vote rigging, hacking of EVM (Electronic voting machine), election manipulation, and polling booth capturing are the major issues in the current voting system
The blockchain is said an emerging, decentralized, and distributed technology that promises to enhance different aspects of many industries. Expanding e-voting into blockchain technology could be the solution to eliminate the present concerns in the e-voting system
There is no doubt that the ever-changing concept of the blockchain, which is the backbone of the famous cryptocurrency Bitcoin has triggered the start of a new era in the Internet and the online services. While most people focus only on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies; there are in fact, many operations, both administrative and fintech that can only be done online/offline can now safely be moved to the Internet as online services because of immutability of blockchain. What makes blockchain a powerful tool is its smarts contracts and many features which overcomes traditional systems.
Smart contracts are meaningful pieces of codes, to be integrated in the blockchain and executed as scheduled in every step of blockchain updates. E-voting, is another trending, yet critical, topic related to the online services. The blockchain with the smart contracts, emerges as a good candidate to use in developments of safer, cheaper, more secure, more transparent, and easier-to-use e-voting systems. Due to its consistency, widespread use, and provision of smart contracts logic, Ethereum and its network is one of the most suitable ones. An e-voting system must be secure, as it should not allow duplicated votes and be fully transparent, while protecting the privacy of the attendees.