SoK: Uncentralisable Ledgers and their Impact on Voting Systems
This addresses the challenge of decentralization for voting systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain technology.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring lasting decentralization in systems by introducing the concept of uncentralisable ledgers, and finds that their key innovation enables self-sovereign and distributed identity providers for voting systems.
As we observe a trend towards the recentralisation of the Internet, this paper raises the question of guaranteeing an everlasting decentralisation. We introduce the properties of strong and soft uncentralisability in order to describe systems in which all authorities can be untrusted at any time without affecting the system. We link the soft uncentralisability to another property called perfect forkability. Using that knowledge, we introduce a new cryptographic primitive called uncentralisable ledger and study its properties. We use those properties to analyse what an uncentralisable ledger may offer to classic electronic voting systems and how it opens up the realm of possibilities for completely new voting mechanisms. We review a list of selected projects that implement voting systems using blockchain technol- ogy. We then conclude that the true revolutionary feature enabled by uncentralisable ledgers is a self-sovereign and distributed identity provider.