WeVoting: Blockchain-based Weighted E-Voting with Voter Anonymity and Usability

Abstract

E-voting plays a vital role in guaranteeing and promoting social fairness and democracy. However, traditional e-voting schemes rely on a centralized organization, leading to a crisis of trust in the vote-counting results. In response to this problem, researchers have introduced blockchain to realize decentralized e-voting, but the adoption of blockchain also brings new issues in terms of flexibility, anonymity, and usability. To this end, in this paper, we propose WeVoting, which provides weight-based flexibility with solid anonymity and enhances usability by designing a voter-independent on-chain counting mechanism. Specifically, we use distributed ElGamal homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proof to achieve voting anonymity with weight. Besides, WeVoting develops a counter-based counting mechanism to enhance usability compared with those self-tallying schemes. By critically designing an honesty-and-activity-based incentive algorithm, WeVoting can guarantee a correct counting result even in the presence of malicious counters. Our security and performance analyses elaborate that WeVoting achieves high anonymity in weighed voting under the premise of meeting the basic security requirements of e-voting. And meanwhile, its counting mechanism is sufficient for practical demands with reasonable overheads.