Election using blockchain
As media outlets waited to announce a winner until the Saturday following the U. A new report from MIT , however, strongly argues against the idea of blockchain-based e-voting, largely on the basis that it will increase cybersecurity vulnerabilities that already exist, it fails meet the unique needs of voting in political elections and it adds more issues than it fixes. The paper was published on the research team's website this week and is being reviewed by a major cybersecurity journal for publication this winter.. The report recognizes the desire for people to want the voting process to be faster and more efficient, but pushes back on the idea that just because we do things like shop or bank online, that means elections should be done in the same way. But when it comes to election, there is little remedy if a vote is altered or not delivered, particularly given that online voting systems might not always recognize when one of these actions occurred.
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Election using blockchain
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Content:
- Electronic Voting Using Blockchain And Smart Contracts: Proof Of Concept
- New MIT Paper Roundly Rejects Blockchain Voting as Solution to Election Woes
- Should we already be using blockchain as a voting system for elections?
- A Manipulation Prevention Model for Blockchain-Based E-Voting Systems
- What is blockchain-based e-voting?
- Blockchain may introduce new problems to voting system, says study
- Which Countries Are Casting Votes Using Blockchain?
- Alaska would be first state to use blockchain-based voting system under proposed bill
Electronic Voting Using Blockchain And Smart Contracts: Proof Of Concept
Voters are understandably concerned about election security. News reports of possible election interference by foreign powers, of unauthorized voting, of voter disenfranchisement, and of technological failures call into question the integrity of elections worldwide.
While current election systems are far from perfect, Internet- and blockchain-based voting would greatly increase the risk of undetectable, nation-scale election failures.
Online voting may seem appealing: voting from a computer or smartphone may seem convenient and accessible. However, studies have been inconclusive, showing that online voting may have little to no effect on turnout in practice, and it may even increase disenfranchisement. More importantly, given the current state of computer security, any turnout increase derived from Internet- or blockchain-based voting would come at the cost of losing meaningful assurance that votes have been counted as they were cast, and not undetectably altered or discarded.
This state of affairs will continue as long as standard tactics such as malware, zero day, and denial-of-service attacks continue to be effective. Finally, we suggest questions for critically assessing security risks of new voting system proposals. Computers and the Internet have brought great benefits: improving efficiency, reliability, scalability, and convenience of many aspects of daily life. However, voting online has a fatal flaw. Online voting systems are vulnerable to serious failures : attacks that are larger scale, harder to detect, and easier to execute than analogous attacks against paper-ballot-based voting systems.
Furthermore, online voting systems will suffer from such vulnerabilities for the foreseeable future given the state of computer security and the high stakes in political elections. While convenience and efficiency are essential properties of election systems, just as security is, these goals must be balanced and optimized together. An election system is ineffective if any one of these goals is compromised.
Exposing our election systems to such serious failures is too high a price to pay for the convenience of voting from our phones. What good is it to vote conveniently on your phone if you obtain little or no assurance that your vote will be counted correctly, or at all?
Those who favor increasing turnout, reducing fraud, or combating disenfranchisement should oppose online voting because the possibility for serious failure undermines these goals. Increased turnout only matters in a system that meaningfully assures that votes are counted as cast.
The increased potential for large-scale, hard-to-detect attacks against online voting systems means increased potential for undetected fraud, coercion, and sophisticated vote tampering or vote suppression targeting specific voter groups. What is more, online voting may not increase turnout. Recent US studies demonstrate significant demographic disparities in smartphone ownership e. Yet proposals for online voting have increased. These proposals are often misperceived as promoting the goals listed above: increasing turnout, reducing fraud, or combating disenfranchisement and coercion.
Some online voting proposals have promised added security based on blockchain technology, 2 and have continued development and deployment despite vocal opposition by computer security and blockchain experts [ 7 , 8 ] and technology reporters [ 9 , 10 ]. Recent research shows that Voatz suffers from serious security vulnerabilities enabling attackers to monitor votes being cast and to change or block ballots at large scale, unnoticed by voters and election officials [ 15 ].
A blockchain-based voting system was also used in Moscow, Russia, for its September city council elections [ 16 ]. Though some system code [ 17 ] was published and security researchers were invited to audit it [ 18 , 19 ], the system was shown to be gravely vulnerable—not once, but twice the second time after a proposed fix [ 20 ].
Moscow responded constructively to the first reported vulnerability, but appears to have largely ignored the second. Japan and Switzerland have also conducted smaller blockchain voting experiments [ 21 , 22 ]. The recent interest in online and blockchain voting proposals appears related to a growing political enthusiasm for improving and modernizing election systems—and for increasing their security from malicious interference a topic of particular recent prominence in American politics.
This is a promising trend, given that historically, many election authorities have been heavily constrained by limited funding for election equipment. We hope that this enthusiasm may lead to support and adoption of more secure, more transparent election equipment addressing the many security flaws that have been documented in existing voting systems, as extensively documented for US voting equipment [ 23—25 ].
New technologies should be approached with particular caution when a mistake could undermine the democratic process. A natural but mistaken inclination is to entirely replace existing voting methods with the latest digital technologies.
Security considerations for online shopping and online banking are different than those for election systems, in two key ways. First, online shopping and banking systems have higher tolerance for failure—and they do fail.
Credit card fraud happens, identity theft happens [ 27 ], and sensitive personal data are massively breached e. Online shopping and banking are designed to tolerate failure: merchants, banks, and insurers absorb the risk because doing so is in their economic interest. Governments may also provide legal recourse for victims as for the Equifax settlement [ 29 ]. Users of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have lost hundreds of millions of dollars [ 30 ] due to theft, fraud, or mistake.
Cryptocurrencies have fewer risk-absorption mechanisms than traditional banking; losses often fall directly on the victims, with no third party to provide relief. The second key way in which the threat profile of online banking, shopping, and cryptocurrencies differs from that of elections is the skill level and aims of the adversary.
Elections are high-value targets for sophisticated nation-state attackers, whose objective is not fraudulent financial transactions but changing or undermining confidence in election outcomes. From a computer security perspective, securing an online voting system is a starkly different—and much harder—problem than securing online shopping or banking system. This compelling requirement implies both that the election system must be auditable meaning it creates an evidence trail that can be checked to confirm that each relevant part of the system is functioning correctly as intended and that any given election run using that system must be audited meaning that that evidence trail is actually checked in that given instance.
Next, we highlight five minimal—necessary but insufficient—requirements for secure elections in an evidence-based framework: i ballot secrecy; ii software independence; iii voter-verifiable ballots; iv contestability; and v auditing. Ballot secrecy is essential to combat voter corruption and coercion. Software independence is a key property to ensure auditability of the casting, collecting, and tallying components of election systems.
For example, a remote programmer changing a line of code could in principle change millions of electronic ballots in milliseconds, whereas changing millions of paper ballots requires physical access and one-by-one handling. Software independence does not require systems to not use software at all: rather, it means that the work of any software-based piece of the system including auditing components be checkable, in principle, using non-software-based means.
The basic definition of software independence leaves open by whom errors should be detectable: the appropriate answer to this question depends on the context, but using the tripartite framework just mentioned, individual voters should be able to detect errors in i and ii , and anyone should be able to detect errors in iii. Who can verify i and ii is constrained by the ballot secrecy requirement from above.
Even before ballot casting, a voter composing a ballot must be able to verify for herself that her prepared ballot reflects her intended choices. Paper ballots inherently enable simple verification that ballots are recorded as intended: a property that is challenging for electronic-ballot systems to achieve.
A voter looking at their completed paper ballot can directly see whether their intended choices are marked and, in principle, detect any mistakes they made. Software independence alone leaves another question unresolved: when an error is detected, can the one who detected it convince others that an error indeed occurred? Some types of errors may be publicly detectable, rendering the second question moot since then anyone can run the verification procedure for themselves.
However, certain verification procedures may be nonpublic: e. A contestable voting system is one that provides publicly verifiable evidence that the election outcome is untrustworthy, whenever an error is detected [ 37 ].
As already mentioned, in addition to being auditable which, for casting-and-tallying systems, corresponds to software independence and contestability , elections should be audited. Auditing checks that the evidence is trustworthy and, for casting-and-tallying systems, consistent with the announced election outcome. Both auditability and auditing are necessary for evidence-based elections. Such auditing should include compliance audits and risk-limiting audits [ 32 ].
Election equipment may fail. The system must be designed not only to prevent failures, but also to ensure timely detection of failures when they occur: the public has a right to know about failures in the election process.
We refer the interested reader to Appel and Stark [ 31 ] for a more in-depth discussion of security requirements in evidence-based elections. Indeed, the interaction of these requirements is remarkably complex; it is surprisingly challenging to design systems that achieve even the minimal requirements all at once, and no currently known technology—including blockchain—is close to enabling mobile or Internet voting systems to simultaneously achieve of all these requirements.
This article suggests four main categories of voting systems, determined by two key system attributes also depicted in Table 1 :. Does the system have voter-verifiable paper ballots or are ballots represented in a format that is not verifiable by voters?
Not every voting system that uses a phone, the Internet, or blockchain technology necessarily falls in the bottom-right category. For instance, an in-person paper-ballot-based voting system could use such technology as an auxiliary tool: e. This article does not oppose the use of technology in the context of in-person voting systems with hand-marked paper ballots, and would support it in many contexts. The top row and the left column of Table 1 are, respectively, strongly preferable to the bottom row and the right column in terms of security risk.
We consider the top row suitable for political elections, with in-person voting preferable to mail-in voting wherever feasible as indicated by their graduated green color. Importantly, top-row systems are software independent; bottom-row systems are not.
We consider the bottom row unsuitable for political elections for the foreseeable future, due to their lack of software independence and the greater risk of compromise compared to corresponding alternatives in the top row. The left column of Table 1 is preferable to the right column, because remote voting systems enable coercion and vote selling. Voters using remote voting system lack the seclusion provided by a physical polling place, so a coercer or vote buyer can look over the shoulder of a voter to confirm that they are voting as instructed or paid to.
A final note on our categorization: there may be proposals that appear not to fall squarely into our four-way categorization, by attempting to have electronic records that are somehow voter-verifiable. A number of recent pieces of proposed legislation in the USA have recognized the need for paper-ballot-based voting systems i. For example, the SAFE Act [ 39 ] requires durable paper ballots; that voters be able to inspect marked ballots before casting; that voters with disabilities have an equivalent opportunity to vote including privacy and independence to other voters; that voting technology be manufactured domestically; and other basic security requirements such as air-gapping.
Much of our reasoning applies to all electronic voting, while some applies only to online or blockchain voting. This article focuses on systems for casting and tallying votes the focus of recent online and blockchain-based voting proposals. Internet- or blockchain-based technologies may help with other aspects of elections e. Finally, this article focuses on the heightened security required, and particular threats faced, by political elections.
Some elections, such as professional society elections, may have less stringent security requirements. This section argues that there is a class of security flaws that so gravely undermine election integrity—and thereby, democratic legitimacy—as to outweigh countervailing interests, and that electronic voting is more vulnerable to such failures than paper-based alternatives. We call these serious failures : situations where election results have been changed whether by simple error or adversarial attack and the change may be undetectable, or even if detected, be irreparable without running a whole new election.
Vulnerability to serious failures thus undermines government legitimacy, whether or not the vulnerability was exploited by an attacker. Even simple, well-understood tools like paper ballots are not totally immune to serious failures.
For instance, if an election official may handle ballots in secret, they may undetectably destroy ballots cast against a particular candidate. If the malicious authority is crafty enough, and the margin of victory small enough, it can discard ballots such that the public may never know. This is why most election authorities employ transparency measures, such as allowing independent observers including representatives from either party to monitor and contest any part of the election process [ 42 ].
Unfortunately, independent observers and monitors have limited ability to prevent such failures: no group has infinite funds, time, and expertise. Undetectable attacks: If an attacker can alter the election outcome without any realistic risk of the modification being caught by voters, election officials, or auditors , the attack becomes impossible to prevent or mitigate.
It is clear that exploitation can provide an adversary with an incredible amount of control over digital systems, allowing for scalable and undetectable attacks. Once exploited, attackers have complete control over targeted voting systems and how they interact with the voter.
For example, ShadowWalker, a particularly advanced example, exists only in memory, and cannot be examined by the most privileged levels of the operating system [ 45 ]. Such malware is difficult to detect and, after the fact, may remove itself from the system without leaving a trace.
New MIT Paper Roundly Rejects Blockchain Voting as Solution to Election Woes
Main objective of the operation: Create job opportunities by promoting business competitiveness. The project wishes to implement the breakthrough idea of Crypto-Voting through the use of two connected one-way pegged sidechain-style blockchains: one to register voters and register their votes and another for counting the votes allocated to the various candidates. Crypto-Voting is the innovative integrated electronic voting system that Net Service S. The objective of the Crypto-Voting project is to study and develop a new electronic voting system integrated with one or more electoral event management procedures system set-up, credential distribution, voting, ballot collection, preference counting, publication of the results, etc. The system, previewed in Seville, within the IC3K September framework, will manage operationally three distinct phases of the process:.
Should we already be using blockchain as a voting system for elections?
Skip to Main Content. A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. Use of this web site signifies your agreement to the terms and conditions. In India elections play a huge role in deciding the government. But, during the years, the people are losing their hope in the elections conducted due to many allegations of bribery, identity theft in voting, repeated votes, false votes and many others. There is a need for establishing a highly secure election system to protect the integrity of the elections. A blockchain based voting system using multichain platform can address this problem and provide a highly secure voting system. At the same time, it also allows voters the ability to vote directly from their homes with an access to a PC. The blockchain technology is computationally secure and cannot be easily tampered with.
A Manipulation Prevention Model for Blockchain-Based E-Voting Systems
EXCLUSIVE -- With the presidential election less than a few weeks away -- encumbered yet again by questions and concerns surrounding ballot security and fraud -- revolutionary blockchain voting technology is being piloted in small pockets of the country. And Tuesday marked the first time a vote has ever been cast for a U. It ensures the absolute integrity of our elections; it ensures voters can vote with confidence. Brock Pierce Campaign.
What is blockchain-based e-voting?
The proposed system consists of a GUI, an application interface, central database, Blockchain network. Pre-election registration process, voting, counting, final election results and auditing were explained. The consensus algorithm was proof-of-work, all the election properties such as validity, privacy, individuality, flexibility etc. Blockchain technology is a rapidly evolving technology. We remember the times when we used internet just to send e-mails, and none of us ever thought we would use it for online shopping, banking etc.
Blockchain may introduce new problems to voting system, says study
Voting is a fundamental element of any collaboration between individuals, with methods ranging from a show of hands and the use of a ballot box, to online voting and liquid democracy platforms. However, online voting and e-democracy platforms are subject to certain problems that undermine the definitive nature and certainty of the process:. In the context of public elections, these critical aspects are managed at a significant cost: just consider the various figures involved in the control and in the calculation of votes counting managers, polling station managers, law enforcement personnel and the characteristics of the equipment used voting cards, stamps, special pencils. Ballotchain is a solution dedicated to making every online voting initiative as secure and verifiable as a public election. Imagine an online system where it is possible to vote using a computer, tablet, mobile phone or a multimedia totem without the need for voters to physically access the polling station, yet offering the same or better guarantees compared to a public election:. All guaranteed even in case of availability attacks, thanks to the specific characteristics of the Blockchain Technology. The fundamental idea of the Ballotchain solution is to match a Bitcoin transaction to a vote cast by an elector in support of the candidate selected by the voter. Every vote therefore benefits from the characteristics of a Blockchain transaction, namely: It is non-modifiable; It is non-repudiable; It cannot be registered in multiple ways; All nodes possess a valid copy.
Which Countries Are Casting Votes Using Blockchain?
Alaska would become the first state to adopt blockchain technology statewide in its voting security system under a proposal by Wasilla Republican Sen. Mike Shower. The proposal is part of a new version of Senate Bill 39 Shower unveiled on Thursday.
Alaska would be first state to use blockchain-based voting system under proposed bill
RELATED VIDEO: Using Blockchain To Make Elections UnhackableEC is also working on linking Aadhaar card with voter id as part of electoral reforms, Sunil Arora said 'We are very hopeful by Lok Sabha elections you will see a lot of fundamental differences the way we Election Commission is working,' he added. We are doing a Blockchain project. We are very hopeful by Lok Sabha elections you will see a lot of fundamental differences the way we Election Commission is working, including this e-voting ," Arora replied when asked if the EC is working to introduce app-based e-voting for the convenience of citizens to vote remotely. He said the EC is also working on linking Aadhaar card with voter id as part of electoral reforms. On "One Nation One Election," he said the existing laws will have to be amended to undertake that gigantic exercise which also requires political consensus. Unless you align the life of Parliament with the life of the state legislatures by amendments of the law
In the era of remote access riding on digital interventions — from transferring funds to tele-teaching and tele-health — digital interfaces in the electoral process cannot stay far behind, especially in a democracy. In a bid to address this, the Telangana government is implementing a first-of-its-kind e-voting or electronic voting solution in the country. This is ideally meant for anyone unable to reach the polling booth or prefers to cast his or her vote remotely. The focus initially however, is not for everyone but to those who are physically challenged, elderly and ailing. That it is based on blockchain technology makes it more secure crucial in an electoral arena, where there could be a tendency to manipulate voting. They need to have this matched with their selfie.
Voting is one of the most fundamental aspects of democracy. Over the past few decades, voting methods around the world have expanded from traditional paper ballot systems to electronic voting e-voting , in which votes are written directly to computer memory. Like any computer system, voting machines are susceptible to technical vulnerabilities that open up opportunities for hackers to tamper with votes, causing the use of electronic voting technology to raise concerns about ballot security. We describe how electronic voting can be supported by blockchain technology to ensure voter secrecy, vote correctness, and equal voting rights.
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