Traditionally, electronic voting has relied on a centralized method of administration. The database and the system are both under the jurisdiction of the system's central administration, which oversees the voting process. As a result, issues like database manipulation and duplicate voting may arise, whether accidentally or purposefully. Permissionless blockchain technology has helped overcome many of these issues; however, since the basic consensus technique of such blockchains demands particular computer resources for each voting operation, they are not ideal for new voting systems. Power consumption, efficiency, and system latency all suffer as a result. These issues may be alleviated in part if electronic voting technologies are used. By using corporate blockchain technology, this research presents an electronic voting system that is very reliable and secures the secret vote. It also discusses some of the frequent security and dependability challenges of electronic voting system solutions, such as a flexible network setup.
Top1. Introduction
Security is of the utmost importance in every election since it guarantees that every voter’s right is respected. Computer applications may be used to ensure security while also lowering the expense of holding a nationwide poll. Pen and paper have always been the voting method used to choose any candidate (Roh & Lee, 2020). In the modern day, electronic voting machines (EVMs) are used instead of paper ballots, and the voter casts their vote by pushing a button that corresponds to the leader they prefer. After hitting the button, the vote is added to the leader’s account (Amir Latif, Hussain, Jhanjhi, Nayyar, & Rizwan, 2020).
The security community has seen electronic voting machines as vulnerable to manipulation because of worries about manual security. Anybody with physical access to the EVM can disrupt it, causing the election results to be impacted. It is where the Blockchain Mechanism enters the picture (Mukherjee, Boshra, Ashraf, & Biswas, 2020). A Blockchain is a public ledger that is distributed, irrefutable, and unchangeable. Decentralized databases, like the Blockchain, may be used to create trestles and distributed systems. There is no such thing as a “central coordinator” in this system. Instead, the data block is stored locally on each block on the Blockchain. Research in medicine, property resale, and carbon dating used this technology originally developed for money transfer applications (Latif et al., 2021).
Ethereum is one of several Blockchains that have been built throughout time. It comes with a Turing-complete programming language, and users on the Ethereum network may use it to construct their functions using smart contracts (Latif et al., 2019). Using a distributed system implies that computing is reliant on the Blockchain. To have a trustless system, all voters must trust each other and not any administration. This protocol establishes the system’s accuracy and ensures voters’ privacy by encrypting all votes. The final election outcome cannot be tampered with threshold encryption, even if an election administrator is malevolent (Priyadarshini et al., 2022). It is accomplished via the use of an asymmetric cryptographic approach. To ensure the integrity of the voting process, all parties participating in the election are given a public key, and the whole secret key is kept safe until the key reconstruction stage (Sharma et al., 2022). The secret key is reconstituted when n or more parties contribute their secrets.
Smart Contracts run the whole voting process on the Ethereum Blockchain. The outcome of a smart contract on the Blockchain may be relied upon as if it were the result of a trustworthy computer (Kok, Abdullah, & Jhanjhi, 2020). As soon as a Smart contract is performed, all parties are bound by the terms of the agreement. A smart contract written in the Ethereum programming language can implement voting functionality (Al-Madani, Gaikwad, Mahale, & Ahmed, 2020). This feature will require the generation of candidate data and procedures for adding votes to the appropriate candidates, among other things. To confirm the authenticity of the final result, the smart contract code will be run on every node of the Ethereum network. Consequently, the finished product is widely accepted by the public (Indapwar, Chandak, & Jain, 2020).