Permissioned Blockchain Voting System using Hyperledger Fabric

Elections are an integral part of democracy. With democracy being the most popular government type in today’s world, the need for the use of free and fair elections to elect a presidential candidate or a party has increased. Elections allow everyone in the country above a certain age group (Age limit as per a country or state’s norms) irrespective of their gender, caste, color, religion, etc., to take part in election and vote for the candidate or party of their choice. The most popular methods of conducting elections are using ballot paper and electronic voting machines (EVM’s). These methods come with their own set of challenges such as lack of security, inefficiency, bogus voting, increased expenditure and ease of manipulation of the props used for voting. In order to tackle these challenges, we are proposing an implementation of elections by making use of permissioned blockchain technology. We aim to make a decentralized voting system using Hyperledger Fabric framework to establish a permissioned blockchain network which would negate the disadvantages of previously used voting mechanisms out there and restrengthen the true meaning of free, fair and sovereign election. In this paper we have described several use cases explaining the various security measures that could be added in order to improve security of the voting systems. Also, we have made use of Hyperledger Caliper to benchmark our blockchain based voting system and test out the system performance with respect to different chaincodes.

I. Introduction

Democracy is said to be the best form of government in today’s world. Elections play a vital role in electing a government of people’s choice in a democracy. In order to conduct free and fair elections security, transparency and authenticity of the system is essential. The popular methods used in India to conduct elections include head count, use of ballot boxes and electronic voting machines (EVM). The voting system we propose can address the following limitations associated with these commonly used voting methods.