FASTEN: Fair and Secure Distributed Voting Using Smart Contracts
This addresses security and privacy issues in electronic voting for democratic elections, offering a scalable solution, though it builds incrementally on existing blockchain-based voting protocols.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring fairness, privacy, and scalability in voting systems by proposing FASTEN, a smart contract-based protocol that preserves voter privacy, ensures vote concealment, immutability, and avoids double voting, with a negligibly small probability of privacy breaches and comparable costs to existing elections on Ethereum.
Electing democratic representatives via voting has been a common mechanism since the 17th century. However, these mechanisms raise concerns about fairness, privacy, vote concealment, fair calculations of tally, and proxies voting on their behalf for the voters. Ballot voting, and in recent times, electronic voting via electronic voting machines (EVMs) improves fairness by relying on centralized trust. Homomorphic encryption-based voting protocols also assure fairness but cannot scale to large scale elections such as presidential elections. In this paper, we leverage the blockchain technology of distributing trust to propose a smart contract-based protocol, namely, \proto. There are many existing protocols for voting using smart contracts. We observe that these either are not scalable or leak the vote tally during the voting stage, i.e., do not provide vote concealment. In contrast, we show that FASTEN preserves voter's privacy ensures vote concealment, immutability, and avoids double voting. We prove that the probability of privacy breaches is negligibly small. Further, our cost analysis of executing FASTEN over Ethereum is comparable to most of the existing cost of elections.