D4: Distributed Direct Digital Democracy
a Remote Electronic Voting Protocol
Rasmus Välling (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Zekeriya Erkin – Mentor
Oğuzhan Ersoy – Mentor
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Abstract
Recently we have been witnesses to a string of controversial elections: the 2016 US Presidential election, the 2016 Brexit referendum, the 2018 Russian presidential election, the 2018 Zimbabwe elections. The controversies surrounding elections are seemingly endless.
Why are these examples relevant? In the 21st century, we are still conducting most of our voting with paper and pencil. Electronic voting methods could resolve much of the controversies and difficulties regarding conventional elections. It would eliminate the uncertainty of counting and be directly verifiable by anyone, not just by a limited number of officials. Electronic voting also has the benefit of being easier to set up and run periodically, which could be implemented to increase the participation of the population further.
This work focuses on how to utilise blockchain in an electronic voting scheme. The blockchain is perfect for voting application for two crucial aspects. First and foremost, due to its inherent public nature, everyone can verify the facts on the blockchain. Verifiability should be a critical requirement for any modern voting system. Secondly, the consensus mechanism allows anyone to participate in the validation and recording of the election process. Furthermore, being distributed, no single entity has full control over the infrastructure.
In the context of voting, verifiability is as valuable as privacy. If the body of literature indicates that verifiability is an inherent property of the blockchain, this is not true for privacy. We propose a scheme that satisfies the strong privacy requirement of receipt-freeness. Validation has shown that the scheme is suitable for large-scale elections and that it performs well on consumer grade hardware.