Securing Nationwide Elections Through Blockchain Ledger, Utilising Encryption Hardware

Nowadays, the voting systems around the world have not been technologically updated much, despite the availability of modern and applicable technologies, that could easily overcome the main problems of elections. Blockchain ledger is the perfect candidate for implementing the whole election process. It will increase trust of all involved parties, create immutable records, secure the data used in the election process and make sure that “every vote counts”. The election process will be secured and verifiable with full accountability through data encryption, considering the effect of social conformity on collective voting behavior. Securing the election process and election results through technological advancements is a key element of sustaining the democratic processes around the world or develop a “decentralized democracy”. Every democratic society starts its long path of evolution exactly with the election process and thus it is of fundamental importance to secure this process, its results and provide maximum transparency to the population to avoid any misconceptions or even conspiracy theories. The blockchain ledger as a concept could potentially overcome most of the shortcomings of the current election processes used around the world, including e-voting and machine voting - intermediary processes that just replicate the ancient paper ballot voting mechanism, but in wrapped by electronic means. In this process-design proposal paper, the method for election voting, utilizing blockchain ledger overcomes many classical problems in the election process, such as preserving the secret of the vote, immutability, transparency, decentralization of the system, following the “every vote counts” concept and disallowing double voting. Considering various approaches to blockchain based voting, we have concluded that the best method is to implement a private governmental blockchain solution - both for reducing the costs and for allowing for various specific features to be implemented, such as partial public/private ledger. The consensus algorithm problem could easily be solved by implementing a PoS consensus on a large number of participating nodes, such as most citizens could participate as nodes, being part of a broader eID initiative. Such implementation would prove unrealistic to try and take over a network with millions of independent nodes. The present paper aims at providing only a model for blockchain elections and does not provide an off the shelf solution.