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Related Work
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto invented the basis
for what we now know as blockchain technology
(Nakamoto, 2008). The core concepts for this system
were used in many cryptocurrencies and other appli-
cations, with the reach of its applicable side still not
fully known. Built on the blockchain technology of
Nakamoto was a protocol called PHANTOM, which
we build on here (Sompolinsky and Zohar, 2018).
PHANTOM has been proven to be secure under any
throughput that the network itself can support, which
makes it prime for use in voting systems where voters
can number in the millions.
Many digital voting system are currently in use
around the world. In 2005, Estonia started the first on-
line voting system for municipal elections. In 2007,
internet voting was also used in the Estonian parlia-
mentary election. In 2015, they used an i-voting sys-
tem (Valimised, 2015) for the parliamentary election
system and 30.5% votes were made through i-voting.
In 2015, the state of Virginia in tne United States
of America also implemented a blockchain based so-
lution to vote using Follow My Vote (Vote, 2017).
In this blockchain implementation, voters installed a
”voting booth” on a computer or smartphone. But
there were too many flaws in this implementation and
therefore the Follow My Vote project is still active but
has lost funding.
In 2016, Kaspersky Labs and Economist newspa-
per (Jennifer Bondarchuk, 2017) organized a com-
petition where teams from the United States and
United Kingdom had to implement voting system us-
ing blockchain. The Votebook team from New York
University, U.S.A. came in first place who offered the
most effective case study on how a blockchain voting
system might look.
In 2014, Lalley and Weyl proposed that
blockchain lowers disorder and dictatorship costs of
the voting and electoral process (Lalley and Weyl,
2014). In addition to efficiency gains, this techno-
logical progress has implications for decentralized
institutions of voting. One application they proposed
is Quadratic Voting (QV), which was further studied
by (Posner and Weyl, 2015). Voters making a binary
decision purchase votes from a centralized clearing
house, paying the square of the number of votes
purchased. They show that this process is both
efficient and applicable to modern voting. Last year,
it was suggested that
Quadratic voting is the most important idea
for law and public policy that has emerged
from economics in (at least) the last ten years
(Allen et al., 2017)
We will further some of the initial ideas revolving
around blockchain voting in this paper to a decentral-
ized system that is efficient, secure, and most impor-
tantly realizable for large democracies.
1.1 Drawbacks and Security Issues
Security of digital voting is always a big problem in
voting systems. During these digital voting elections,
researchers identified many potential security risks.
Such risks could be malware in the client machine
that can change a vote for a different candidate or,
another possibility is an attacker can directly infect
servers. However, a model with a blockchain voting
system could prevent these issues but for larger demo-
cratic countries having massive populations and large
geographical area, blockchain alone is not enough of
a solution because of its slow computational speed.
Some countries are also fighting with other prob-
lems in voting systems like illiteracy, threatening vot-
ers, and booth capturing. Therefore, using a current
blockchain voting model is not enough to fight against
a flawed election system.
2 OUR SYSTEM
We break down our system into the following two
contributions:
1. In this paper, we introduce a more advanced
blockchain voting management system. Instead
of using the classic blockchain protocol, we
use the PHANTOM protocol — a protocol for
transaction confirmation that is secure under any
throughput that the network can support. PHAN-
TOM, unlike some of its predecessors, enjoys
very large transaction throughput, which is a ma-
jor downfall of many cryptocurrencies. PHAN-
TOM utilizes a Directed Acyclic Graph of blocks,
aka blockDAG, a generalization of blockchains
which better suits a setup of fast or large blocks.
PHANTOM uses a greedy algorithm on the
blockDAG to distinguish between blocks mined
properly by honest nodes and those mined by non-
cooperating nodes that deviated from the DAG
mining protocol.
2. To help alleviate the problems of booth capturing
or voter threatening, we consider the Borda count
method for vote counting which is a ranked based
voting scheme (Emerson, 2013).
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