From Blockchain to Internet-Based Voting

Blockchain is one of the hottest topics in the discussion of technologies lately. As the enabling technology for Bitcoin, the pioneering cryptocurrency, blockchain is an append-only distributed ledger that is virtually impossible to attack given sufficient scale of participants. Hence, blockchain holds great promises as the fundamental technology to enable Internet-based electronic voting. However, Internet-based voting has additional requirements than monetary transactions. In this paper, we analyze these requirements, review existing proposed solutions, and outline possible improvements. Specifically, we propose to use live biometrics of the voter to perform secure and highly reliable remote authentication. We also propose a scheme to protect the secrecy of the ballots and eliminate the influence of votes already cast. Finally, we propose to impose a hierarchy to the voting infrastructure that aligns naturally with traditional voting, which enables parallel processing of multiple blockchains, to overcome the intrinsic scalability limitation of the blockchain technology.