Blockchain Enabled Voting Systems (an introduction to our project)

Hello Everyone,

In this post, I would like to introduce the project I am working on at King's College London, entitled Voting Over Ledger Technology (the VOLT Project). This is a two-year, EPSRC funded project that aims to explore applications of distributed ledger technologies (including blockchains) in domains involving voting and collective decision making.

Of course, the idea of voting systems backed by blockchain technology did not begin with our project. Multiple organisations/groups/individuals are participating in voting system projects using blockchain tech, and various successes have already been made. I refer the reader to here for a more detailed description of the advantages of blockchain enabled voting systems in the political domain, and here (section F) for a more detailed description of the advantages of blockchain enabled voting systems in the corporate domain. Additionally, in a future article I will be listing all the blockchain enabled voting systems we have currently discovered.

With so many blockchain enabled online voting systems out there, how can we evaluate and compare them from a technical perspective? Well, I think the five key properties outlined by a recent blockchain voting system competition by The Economist and Kaspersky Labs is a good general place to start:

1. Privacy: How does the voting system guarantee that each voter is unique? How does the system count the votes and keep privacy intact?
2. Voting under duress: The voting system should not enable coerced voting. How does the system address this risk of abuse?
3. Interim results: Can the voting system obscure interim results if required?
4. Undecided voters: The voting system must not force undecided voters to vote. How can the system prove that votes have not been taken from voters (including undecided voters) without their consent and used?
5. Vote auditing: The voting system should be amendable to audit to reasonably stop accusations of fraud. how does the system allow a voter to check their vote before and after the election has completed?

The above listed properties are a good place to start the analysis/comparison of different blockchain voting systems, but as they lead to more questions, a more rigorous analysis method is required. Also, these properties say nothing about the actual voting system desired. Intuitively, a simple yes/no majority vote will be easier to implement using a blockchain than a liquid democratic voting system - but how do we know for sure? And how much additionally complexity would occur when we allow voters to submit a preference order for the candidates (e.g. in a single transferable vote system)? What about the situation where some voters can have more votes than others (e.g. shareholder voting), or a subset of votes can have a veto vote (e.g. the UN security council)?

It is all starting to get a bit complex right?

Well one of our project goals is to develop a formal conceptual framework that will capture the properties of different voting systems on a blockchain. Once this formal model that been completed, we will be able to instantiate it with specific voting system rules (e.g. is the voter allowed multiple votes, can a voter submit a preference order of candidates, etc …) and evaluate/compare the mathematical properties that occur. We will add further weight to our conceptual framework by implementing two or more specific blockchain enabled voting systems with our company partners.

In the future, I will write further articles about the non-confidential aspects of our project. For now, do you have any thoughts/suggestions about blockchain enabled voting systems? Or any questions about the VOLT Project? Let me know in the comments below and I will attempt to address them.

Regards,

Luke

(Disclaimer - The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author, and may not necessarily be the same as other members of the VOLT project)