Retrieval of Data from the Database of a BCT–Voting System

Abstract

Voting is one of the critical processes of modern democracy. It gives freedom to the people to choose a representative leader to implement their ideas and promote policies that benefit them. Elections can also be audited to ensure each vote is counted correctly. However, corruption: ballot forgery, coercion, etc can cause the public to lose trust in this system. Thus, BCT-Voting [8] - a fully secure and decentralized blockchain technology-based e-voting system (DApp) - was proposed as a voting system that can increase transparency and public trust. This system will provide a secure form of electronic voting which will allow for remote voting. The proposed BCT-Voting system has been deployed on the Ethereum framework. It includes five modules – nomination process, voter identity, vote tampering, donation module, and final counting of votes. However, the data retrieval and sorting from the Ethereum blockchain is a complex process because the personal identity of voters is not known. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an Ethereum Query Language (EQL) to query data from the smart contract of the BCT-Voting system. The query method allows voters or The Federal Election Commission (FEC) to retrieve the required information from the Ethereum chain such as which account voted, when, and for who while still maintaining the privacy of the voter. This method of querying provides fast and minimally labor-intensive audits of elections. It includes recounting ballots and efficiently tracking the history of casted votes to ensure that votes were counted and handled correctly. In this system finding duplicate and fraudulent voters will be easy and it will increase the efficiency and transparency of the electoral process.