Distributed Protocols at the Rescue for Trustworthy Online Voting
This addresses the security challenges in online voting for democracies, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of trustworthy online voting by analyzing distributed protocols, inspired by Bitcoin, to eliminate the need for a trusted authority and enhance ballot secrecy and integrity through collective voter enforcement.
While online services emerge in all areas of life, the voting procedure in many democracies remains paper-based as the security of current online voting technology is highly disputed. We address the issue of trustworthy online voting protocols and recall therefore their security concepts with its trust assumptions. Inspired by the Bitcoin protocol, the prospects of distributed online voting protocols are analysed. No trusted authority is assumed to ensure ballot secrecy. Further, the integrity of the voting is enforced by all voters themselves and without a weakest link, the protocol becomes more robust. We introduce a taxonomy of notions of distribution in online voting protocols that we apply on selected online voting protocols. Accordingly, blockchain-based protocols seem to be promising for online voting due to their similarity with paper-based protocols.