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Blockchain-Based Internet Voting: Systems’ Compliance with International Standards

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Business Information Systems Workshops (BIS 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 339))

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Abstract

Blockchain has emerged as the technology claiming to change the way services are delivered nowadays, from banking to public administrations. The field of elections, and specifically internet voting, is not an exception. As a distributed audit layer, it is expected that blockchain technology will provide more transparency to such services, while preventing that a simple agent can tamper with electoral electronic data. Elections require a challenging combination of privacy and integrity. However, a system that would store ballots in clear on a public blockchain, while transparent, would not comply with secret suffrage, one key principle for democratic elections. For this reason, the motivation of this paper is to assess the potential of blockchain technology in internet voting. To this end we analyse several blockchain-based internet voting systems and their degree of compliance against a set of commonly accepted properties of internet voting, namely those of the Council of Europe. This has allowed us to identify a set of common features and challenges on how blockchain can contribute to the conduct of e-enabled elections.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See for instance: https://www.coe.int/en/web/electoral-assistance/e-voting. On their side, other authors are more cautious and argue that “Rec(2004)11 [was] the only international document regulating e-voting from a legal perspective” [28] or that “[t]he Council of Europe is the only international organisation to have issued recommendations on the regulation of the use of e-voting” [14].

  2. 2.

    No specific standards are considered for the fifth principle (direct suffrage), nor for the fre-quency of elections. On the other side, the Recommendation does identify a set of standards that could be linked to the procedural guarantees that the Code considers as part of the European Electoral Heritage, i.e. respect for fundamental rights, regulatory levels and stability of electoral law and other procedural safeguards.

  3. 3.

    We may have excluded some standards, mainly because they refer to the user interface of an e-voting system (which is client-side, and thus has little to do with the use of blockchain technology). This is the case of standards 1, 2 and 4, for example. We have also excluded the standards related to Regulatory and organisational requirements, Transparency and observation, Accountability nor Reliability and security of the system, since they do not refer to what an e-voting system is supposed to do, but rather to how national legislation should include when it comes to regulate e-voting and/or to procedural guarantees on how the standards can be audited and certified.

  4. 4.

    While we have aimed at being exhaustive, we have selected those systems for which information was available at the time of writing this paper.

  5. 5.

    http://docs.bitshares.eu/.

  6. 6.

    https://gitlab.com/exo-one/svst-docker/blob/master/svst-docs/secure.vote.white.napkin.md.

  7. 7.

    The process for a patent application was initially launched, although it was discontinued later on. See Australian Patent 2017900257.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/swarmfund/sv-voting-mvp.

  9. 9.

    https://bit.ly/2J6EqIK.

  10. 10.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-authority.

  11. 11.

    https://github.com/agoravoting/agoravoting-project/wiki.

  12. 12.

    https://www.mivote.org.au/.

  13. 13.

    https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-20.md.

  14. 14.

    https://raiden.network/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scytl Secure Electronic Voting S.A., C. Enric Granados 84, 08008, Barcelona, Spain

    Jordi Cucurull, Adrià Rodríguez-Pérez, Tamara Finogina & Jordi Puiggalí

Authors
  1. Jordi Cucurull
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  2. Adrià Rodríguez-Pérez
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  3. Tamara Finogina
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  4. Jordi Puiggalí
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Correspondence to Jordi Cucurull .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Poznań University of Economics and Business, Poznań, Poland

    Witold Abramowicz

  2. Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Adrian Paschke

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Cucurull, J., Rodríguez-Pérez, A., Finogina, T., Puiggalí, J. (2019). Blockchain-Based Internet Voting: Systems’ Compliance with International Standards. In: Abramowicz, W., Paschke, A. (eds) Business Information Systems Workshops. BIS 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 339. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04849-5_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04849-5_27

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