TrustVote: On Elections We Trust with Distributed Ledgers and Smart Contracts

Electronic voting (e-voting) plays a crucial role in democratic countries. Unfortunately, implementing a trusted e-voting system is always a challenge. Scholars have been trying to propose solutions to improve e-voting systems. However, existing e-voting approaches still need to adopt new technologies to maintain their integrity and modernity. Unlike other technologies that were used in e-voting, blockchain has the potential for perfecting e-voting requirements and fostering trust in e-voting systems. The first part of this paper presents a state-of-the-art review of blockchain-based e-voting implementations. The second part proposes a blockchain-based e-voting system (TrustVote). TrustVote was realised using public and permissioned blockchain. This work results show that the permissioned blockchain-based implementation of TrustVote outperforms the identical version of the same system that uses public blockchain. The results also show that while several challenges and requirements still need to be addressed, using permissioned blockchain for implementing an e-voting system can help to satisfy many of the requirements for e-voting and pave the road for a new generation of e-voting systems that people can trust.