Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Voting forms the basis of any effective democracy, so the procedures involved must be conducted in a transparent, verifiable, accessible and secure way (Osgood, 2016). Globally, governments use a voting process to implement democracy in elections, which is indeed the backbone of democracy, highlighting citizens' views regarding their choice (Khan, Arshad, & Khan, 2018). The electoral system must have the ultimate safety of ensuring accessibility to eligible users and avoid any internal and external interferences that can change the votes being cast, thus preventing them from being altered (Ayed, 2017). Electronic voting systems can help to improve the traditional electoral system in terms of transparency and accessibility as the systems employ information technology to conduct voting procedures. However, according to the authors of the research work (Pawlak, Poniszewska-Marańda, & Kryvinska, 2018), the lack of transparency and understanding of the system leads to mistrust. A successful voting system should include criteria such as the eligibility, uniqueness, integrity, accuracy and verifiability of the voter. The success of the voting system also depends on the voter’s auditability, system reliability and secrecy. Other voting system features are non-coercibility, flexibility, convenience, transparency and cost-effectiveness. These criteria of the electoral system help optimize the benefits of the voting system from both the citizens’ and the administration's perspectives.
As the technology expanded, the voting systems of many countries started deploying Blockchain technology to enable transparency, privacy and accessibility in the voting process. Blockchain technology is defined as an electronic, decentralized, permanent exchange of records that gives cryptographic confirmation (Fenwick, Kaal, & Vermeulen, 2017). Satoshi Nakamoto founded blockchain innovation in 2008 to allow direct transactions between two parties without an intermediary (Susskind, 2017). The decentralised nature of Blockchain helps a network of nodes to be managed and controlled by peers instead of a centralized administrator. Keeping in mind the above features of the decentralized network brings innovation to the voting system.
This study was conducted to investigate the usage of Blockchain technology in electoral systems. To this end, the study conducted a thematic analysis to answer the following research questions.
Research Questions
- •
What are the main issues and challenges of existing voting systems?
- •
Is it possible that Blockchain technology could enhance the security and privacy of electoral systems?
- •
What other techniques and approaches could be used to overcome the shortcomings of existing voting systems?
This paper focuses on encouraging the use of Blockchain technology by designing a framework for an electronic voting system using Blockchain technology. It also explores how this framework performs, using cases and sequence diagrams for each stage of the main framework. Blockchain technology provides many advantages, such as allowing the system to be decentralized, making it immutable and reliable, with traceable data. Furthermore, Blockchain voting systems are paperless (Hjálmarsson, Hreiðarsson, Hamdaqa, & Hjálmtýsson, 2018).
The contribution of this paper is to design a framework for electronic voting systems using Blockchain technology. This proposed designed framework is motivated by the following objectives.
Research Objectives
- •
To explore and identify the challenges in existing voting systems.
- •
To identify the methods that could enhance the security and privacy of the electoral voting systems using Blockchain technology.
- •
To design a framework for electronic voting systems that use Blockchain technology to solve the limitations of present voting systems.
The remainder of this paper is presented below; Section 2 explains a literature review on Blockchain technology in the voting system. In Section 3, the research methodology of the proposed frameworks is described. The analysis of the study and results are presented in Section 4. The implications and limitations of the proposed system are presented in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 highlights the conclusion and future research.