ethVote: Towards secure voting with distributed ledgers

Abstract

The topic of performing safe and secure elections is a long-standing debate. Regardless, of the various attempts for electronic or Internet-based voting, the majority of countries still use paper ballots. Nevertheless, with major advancements occurring over the last years in both cryptography and distributed ledgers we believe that there is space now for re-investigating this area. In this paper, we propose ethVote an Internet voting system that makes use of the Ethereum blockchain, state of the art cryptographic mechanisms and a P2P-based front-end to ensure a secure voting process. In addition, we provide an open-source proof of concept implementation that features the majority of the needed components for securely using ethVote. Our proposal is tested both in terms of unit testing, requirement verification, and with regard to the feasibility to perform such an operation in a public distributed ledger.