E-Voting Blockchain: Enhancing The Security And Transparency Of Digital Voting

Abstract

Voting is synonymous with general elections especially for countries with democratic system. In an effort to slow down the spread of Covid-19, there is a significant rise in digitalization, and this includes voting. However, concerns regarding security and integrity of the entire system have been raised. The implementation of blockchain in voting is believed can help alleviate the issues raised since blockchain are immutable and decentralized. The usage of smart contract that stores states and run when certain conditions are met can get rid of the possibility of database manipulation while still maintaining anonymity. Unfortunately, implementing an Ethereum-based blockchain is expensive as each transaction cost can cost up to thousands of US dollar. Hence, this study focuses on developing an E-Voting blockchain based prototype using a local chain platform that performs the same operations as blockchain but uses a fake currency which results in a more feasible and cost-effective result. In this context, the objectives of this study were to design and develop the smart contract that satisfies the voting requirement and lastly; to evaluate the performance and security of the developed smart contract; to test the functionality of this study’s prototype. The prototype of this study was developed using a combination of Web 2.0, PHP, MySQL, Express.js and Web 3.0, specifically Ganache, Remix IDE and MetaMask. After the development and integration phases, the prototype was evaluated and validated using unit testing, which tested each function and modules individually before being integrated to ensure full functionality of each module. A total of 20 voters were gathered to test the prototype for the user acceptance testing section of the prototype of this study which shows the viability and usability of the product. E-Voting blockchain based prototype successfully achieved the objectives and solved the problems stated in the proposal. Despite the limitations, there are still expected future works to improve the system in future. Blockchain technology has the potential to grow gradually over the next few years and its technological complexity will be able to be adapted by the users.