New Blockchain-Based Publicly Traceable Self-Tallying Voting Protocol

Electronic voting plays a key role in the functioning of modern democracies. However, existing electronic voting protocols have some disadvantages, such as inability to trace the identity of malicious voters, insecurity of the voting process, and lack of a score voting paradigm. To address these issues, we propose a novel blockchain-based publicly traceable self-tallying voting protocol that implements scored voting. The protocol enables voters to score each candidate within a specified range. At the end of voting, the candidate with the highest total score is declared the winner of the election. Meanwhile, we take advantage of traceable ring signatures and homomorphic time-lock puzzles to balance the anonymity and accountability, and guarantee time-bounded privacy of the ballots. We prove that the proposed protocol satisfies the properties of full-anonymity, linkability, public traceability and time-bounded privacy. In addition, performance analysis shows that our protocol guarantees various properties of score voting with reasonable overhead.