Digital electoral system based on blockchain technology

Abstract

Democracy is a political structure of the state or government, first introduced in Athens, Greece by an Athenian lawgiver Cleisthenes in 508 BC. It was an efficient political structure in the Roman Empire until its gradual decline in 500 AD. For more than one thousand years humans were deprived of Democracy and ruled by brutal empires, dynasties, monarchies, and authoritarian regimes up until the 16th century when democracy again started prevailing in European society. Today it’s the most popular, predominant and efficient political system in the world. In a democracy, the public has the authority to exercise its right to choose the representatives and leaders to run the government and its affairs. This is done through a procedure known as Elections or Voting. Unfortunately, over time people have started losing their trust in democracy because of the weakening credibility of the elections. Powerful governments and political parties around the world have the ability to influence the elections thus raising questions in the minds of the common man that, do people really choose their leaders? Countless incidents around the world indicate that powerful and central authorities can damage the legitimacy of the elections. Since the advent of democracy itself, elections have always been conducted by a central authority. Centralization gives utmost power to a sole authority i.e. government, election commission, therefore increasing the possibility of tampering the process and flagging the trust of people on the process. Voting systems whether traditional or digital, are proved to be not capable of ensuring integrity, security, and immutability. These systems have also failed to address the important problem of centralization which is primarily responsible for damaging the trust of people on democracy and voting. This project aims to address this problem with the help of revolutionary Blockchain technology. Blockchain technology has efficiently provided the solution to create a decentralized environment with aspects like encryption and anonymity in it. Blockchain technology provides a means to establish a decentralized digital ledger on the peer-to-peer network. One of the characteristics of blockchain technology is trust-lessness, which can be proved promising to revive the trust of people in the elections. A trustless system is a system in which the third party is not needed to establish agreements between two peers. For this purpose, a digital contract, i.e. Smart Contract plays the role of establishing agreements. This creates an environment of trust-lessness where the legitimacy of the system is credible. It’s an attempt to create a decentralized digital electoral web-based application based on permissioned blockchain technology in which the process will be fair and transparent and have qualities like immutability, encryption, and anonymity. The project is meant to perform in-house elections i.e. Upper house called Senate and the Lower house called National Assembly.