d-BAEV: Distributed Blockchain-Based Anonymous Electronic Voting

Electronic voting (e-voting) presents a convenient and cost-effective alternative to current paper ballot-based voting. It provides many benefits such as increased voter turnout and accuracy in the decision-making process. While presenting many improvements, e-voting still faces serious security challenges that hinder its adoption, especially when designed to be run over mobile devices. In this paper, we propose d-BAEV, a novel remote e-voting model for large-scale elections by introducing a novel distributed trust model through participation of (at least) two conflicting parties to ensure election integrity and accountability. d-BAEV is secure and preserves voter privacy through secure multi-party computations performed by parties of differing allegiances. It also leverages a blockchain running smart contracts as a publicly accessible and tamper-resistant bulletin board to permanently store votes and prevent double-voting. Our performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed d-BAEV scheme is practical for large-scale elections in smartphone devices.