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Evaluating Blockchain as a Service for E-Voting

ELECTION CREACTION

Election administrators create election ballots using a decentralized app(dApp). This decentralized app interacts with an election creation smart contract, in which the administrator defines a list of candidates and voting districts. This smart contract creates a set of ballot smart contracts and deploys them onto the blockchain, with a list of the candidates, for each voting district, where each voting district is a parameter in each ballot smart contract. When the election is created, each corresponding district node is given permission to interact with his corresponding ballot smart contract

VOTER REGISTRATION

The registration of voter phase is conducted by the election administrators. When an election is created the election administrators must define a deterministic list of eligible voters. This requires a component for a government identity verification service to securely authenticate and authorize eligible individuals. Using such verification services, each of the eligible voter should have an electronic ID and PIN number and information on what voting district the voter is located in. For each eligible voter, a corresponding wallet would be generated for the voter. The wallet generated for each individual voter should be unique for each election the voter is eligible for and a NIZKP could be integrated to generate such wallet so that the system itself does not know which wallet matches an individual voter.

VOTE TRANSACTION

When an individual votes at a voting district, the voter interacts with a ballot smart contract with the same voting district as is defined for any individual voter. This smart contract interacts with the blockchain via the corresponding district node, which appends the vote to the blockchain if consensus is reached between the majority of the corresponding district nodesEach vote is stored as a transaction on the blockchain whereas each individual voter receives the transaction ID for their vote for verifying purposes (see “Verifying vote” section). Each transaction on the blockchain holds information about whom was voted for, and the location of aforementioned vote. Each vote is appended onto the blockchain by its corresponding ballot smart contract, if and only if all corresponding district nodes agree on the verification of the vote data. When a voter casts his vote, the weight of their wallet is decreased by 1, therefore not enabling them to vote more than once per election. a single transaction on the public Ethereum blockchain includes the transaction ID, the block which the transaction is located, the age of the transaction, the wallet which sent the transaction and who received it, the total value which was sent and the transaction fee. A transaction in our proposed system doesn’t require all of this information, a single transaction only has information of the transaction ID, the block which the transaction is located at, to which smart contract the transaction was sent, Finally the value of the transaction is the data which was selected to cast, A transaction in our system . therefore reveals no information about the individual voter who casted this particular vote. The age of a single transaction is excluded to protect individual voters from a timing attack

TALLYING RESULTS

The tallying of the election is done on the fly in the smart contracts. Each ballot smart contract does their own tally for their corresponding location in its own storage. When an election is over, the final result for each smart contract is published.