Decentralized Verifiable Mail-in Ballot Counting for Postal Voting
This addresses the problem of ensuring trust in postal voting systems for election authorities and voters, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain and computer vision methods.
The paper tackles the centralized trust issue in computer vision for mail-in ballot counting by proposing DVote, a prototype system that decentralizes computation and model training using blockchain and layer-2 technologies, resulting in computational integrity anchored to a public blockchain like Ethereum.
As computer vision is prevalently used for mail-in ballot processing and counting, it becomes a point of centralized trust in postal voting. We propose DVote, a prototype system of postal voting that provides decentralized trust in computer vision. With blockchain and layer-2 technologies, DVote decentralizes the computation and model training of computer vision to a group of scrutineers that hold the AnyTrust assumption, i.e., at least one member is honest. Consequently, the computational integrity is anchored to the trustworthiness of a large public blockchain such as Ethereum.