Leveraging blockchain for robust and transparent E-voting systems

Abstract

Voting is considered one of the most critical actions for proper decision-making in governmental entities, boards of directors, and the financial sector. Many researchers proposed E-voting systems where the voting process is done online or through secure voting stations with high levels of trust for recording and counting the votes. Moreover, with the recent pandemic highlighting the need for remote voting, transitioning to E-voting is becoming even more critical. One way to build such technology is through Blockchain, which can be employed to guarantee the voting system requirements such as reliability, anonymity, decentralization, and privacy. This work proposes a blockchain-based E-voting system that consists of a distributed architecture for the voter, intermediate servers, and blockchain network components. The intermediate servers are mainly used to balance the workload between the voters and the blockchain servers. The system servers apply a scheduling algorithm to distribute the workload amongst themselves. In addition to the distributed architecture, a new algorithm for storing the blocks within each server’s database is introduced. Emphasis is further placed on how these blocks are broadcast to the other servers. Simulation results show a clear difference in execution time when comparing the proposed distributed architecture with the centralized system. In addition, the new proposed blockchain algorithm shows better results in executing the vote-counting task and identifying any corrupted blocks.