Paradigm shift in Future e-Voting through Blockchain

Internet today has great advantages of collaboration and communication, however, concerns of privacy have been intensely flawed. Blockchain technology allows peer-to-peer transactions by eliminating the need of any intermediary or any governing body. By keeping the information of user’s as anonymous, it validates and retains a permanent public record of all the transactions . Information via blockchain is highly secure and private, while all the activities involved are incorruptible and transparent.

At present due to the widespread mistrust in governance and influence of external factors in the countries’ processes, transparency in the democratic process for voting has become the need of the hour and therefore, it has become more critical than ever before. Voting is one of the most crucial aspect of democracy in determining their voters right to decide who will lead the country.

Present Voting system is a centralized system that is governed by a single organization that has full control over the database and system that has a greater possibility to tamper with the database. If you compare this to the way we conduct elections, presently, there are stark differences. It currently takes hours and sometimes days to count votes after elections and sometimes results are muddled up on account of human or machine error, which of course results in the process taking even longer. Most important aspect in voting is to ensure that vote is counted correctly.

Being one of the biggest democracy in the world has its consequences as well. Indian elections are one of the costliest and time consuming elections in the world. Elections not only cost us money but time also as each and every individual takes a day off from his daily routine the whole city comes to a halt as people form a queue outside the voting booth waiting for their turn to vote. Having so much value, yet our electoral system fails every time as we see the news of booth capturing, fake voting, people not turning up to vote etc. During the time of elections, due to the lack of integrity, security, confidentiality, authentication people are turning down their basic right to vote.

If we use blockchain in our electoral system many of our problems can be solved easily, as India is growing to be Digital India maybe in future we can implement blockchain for voting as it can solve many of the problems that we face in our voting system as: People won’t need to go to polling booths as they could vote through their phones with their digital authentication techniques such as facial recognition or voice biometrics, thus saving time and authenticating each vote as each individual will be able to vote once through their digital signature hence not revealing their identity to anyone.

Blockchain is paving the way for a direct democracy, where people can decide the course of policy themselves, rather than rely on representatives to do it for them. Fairness and transparency in election process is the paramount need these days. Conventional election system (offline) suffers from the threat of security and transparency.

Blockchain holds to offer cost effective and smart solutions to the existing issues of the current voting process. Blockchain preserves voters’ confidentiality and privacy of votes while being open to public scrutiny. It is capable of maintaining accountability, auditability and authentication of votes with more transparency and convenience by streamlining counting and minimizing costs involved. Although nothing is free of faults and secure these days, yet blockchain enabled voting process holds to make tampering, manipulation and altering almost impossible that will also help in possessing general public faith in the governance and thus will result in increased public participation and turnout.

The present process of voting consists of two steps; first is to register for the vote and the next is the process of voting itself. The system of e -voting presented through the blockchain will have an extra step in it; that will enable the users to verify their votes and to get an affirmation of their votes. Bolckchain technology in voting has the potential to address all the concerns, shortfalls and barriers of the present system. Blockchain in voting stands to solve society’s ultimate challenge of trust that will also eliminate the need of any middleman in between. Voting scheme would have following phases after being deployed on the blockchain.

• Setup — Election authority uploads all information about the election. Length of voting and registration periods, threshold key for voters to encrypt their votes and the voting options.

• Registration — At this phase any voter can go with the election authority and request his public key be included into the set of public keys eligible to vote.

• Voting — At this phase any previously registered voter and submit an encrypted vote with the threshold key published in the contract with a ring signature of all the public keys registered in the sub ring.

• On Completion of Voting — Once the voting phase is over all the third parties holding secrets can submit them to the blockchain. When all the secrets are in the contract, anybody can download and reconstruct the private key.

• Ready to Tally — Anybody can tally the result of the election

Blockchain technology can improve the voting system in many ways — it enjoys the advantages of a decentralized system, in that, database is owned by a number of users rather than a single entity. E- voting system governed by the blockchain technology uses smart contracts that will result in more cost efficient elections that also ensures voters’ privacy and also reduces the instances of cheating and data manipulation. Advantages of Blockchain based voting are numerous:

· Hackers won’t be able to hack

· Voting Data is safe as the data(nodes) are totally decentralized.

· No more need of EVMs or polling booths, hence reducing the cost of voting and no more booth capturing.

· Voters turnout at voting booths has reduced in past elections hence if they find an easier way to vote which doesn’t affect their daily routine that number is likely to rise.

· Use Facial Recognition or Voice Biometric to authenticate genuine voter.

· Voters can vote using their mobile phones or laptop / desktops.

Hence we can say that introduction of blockchain in the voting system will pave the way for more transparency in our election system as their will be no errors, manipulation, or tampering. Each voter is in control and can monitor his vote while remain anonymous amongst a set of users.