Appeared at: IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (IEEE ICBC ’21)

Sankarshan Damle, Sujit Gujar, And Moin Hussain Moti

As direct democracy is impractical, countries employ representative democracy. Elections allow each individual to take part in this decision-making process. Given this, it is imperative that elections are processed in a fair and secure manner. In this work, we define a Fair and Secure Election (FSE) as an election in which:
1) A voter can freely vote for its desired preference; and
2) Its participation in the election process is hidden.

To construct an FSE, we observe that the following properties must be satisfied:
1) Voter Anonymity (VA): A vote can not be linked to the voter
2) Vote Concealment (VC): The vote’s value must be hidden
3) Vote Immutable (VI): A vote once cast, can not be altered
4) Double Voting Inhibition (DVI): A voter can not re-cast their vote.
In this work, we aim to create an FSE over the blockchain satisfying VA, VC, VI, and DVI such that the protocol is also scalable.

FASTEN Protocol Timeline

Figure 1 illustrates our novel protocol for an FSE.

Figure 1: FASTEN Protocol Timeline

FASTEN: Required Properties

FASTEN provides the following guarantees with high probability.

  1. Voter Anonymity (VA): As each voter uses an anonymized token to cast their vote
  2. Vote Concealment (VC): As each vote submitted is encrypted
  3. Vote Immutable (VI): This follows as the Ethereum blockchain is immutable
  4. Double Voting Inhibition (DVI): Each voter’s token can be tracked allowing the EC to discount an extra vote

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *