If you follow fields like banking, investing, or cryptocurrency, you may be familiar with blockchain, the technology behind the Bitcoin network. Interest in how blockchain technology can be adopted in today's industries and especially in e-voting protocols is constantly growing. In Open Blockchain anyone can post a transaction and participate in the network by following a set of published rules. How can blockchain technology ensure the privacy, security and propriety of online voting?
- Advantages: Open blockchains can be used for distributed immutability of data, i.e. ensuring that data has not been changed after it has been published.
- Disadvantages: Open blockchains by default do not provide data encryption, a key element in ensuring vote secrecy and voter privacy.
Anonymity & Authenticity
A key requirement for the security of electronic voting is that third parties will not be able to access information about how someone votes or even manipulate their vote. Especially in cases of elections, in order for a citizen to vote, he must meet whatever conditions apply. The right to vote must be verified and its uniqueness certified. There is a challenge in balancing the above requirements.
We want a person X to be able to see their vote choice, but we don't want others to be able to do the same. So the BIG challenge is how do we keep votes anonymous and at the same time allow voters to securely check their encrypted votes.
In an electronic vote, the identity of the voters cannot be verified by their physical presence inside the electoral commission, nor that the vote will be placed in the ballot box by the voter himself. In online voting, privacy and anonymity may seem difficult to achieve, given that voters must identify themselves to the same system they use to vote and that their vote is transmitted from their device to a voting server. However, privacy and anonymity can be achieved in an online vote and there can be a guarantee that the votes will not be known to anyone else and that their vote has not been tampered with.
Switching from paper to electronic voting will reduce costs and increase voter participation.
Nowadays, we are rethinking the value of our physical presence in boardrooms and meetings! We can conduct electronic voting in our companies, organizations, local political groups and learn from this experience. This way, we can specialize what is needed to enhance the privacy, security and controllability of the whole process!
We need to scale our experiences from small to large scale e-voting!
Governments and the general public tend to be slow to adopt certain innovations, especially for election security. With this in mind, it will take time for national elections based on electronic voting to be widely adopted. These systems need extensive testing before they can be implemented on a national scale. We need more time to adopt and evaluate the benefits as well as the risks. We need to scale our experiences from small to large scale e-voting!
