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members. Finally, when the vote could concern citi-
zens who are asked for an opinion on the functioning
of the PA or, in order to carry out a market survey, and
customers (or tourists) who are asked for feedback on
the services they have used or desired.
According to our idea Crypto-voting it is placed
as a leverage of change with the end to achieve the
objective to reinforce the Information and Commu-
nication Technologies (TIC or ICT) applications for
e-government, e-learning, e- inclusion, e-culture and
e-health. The idea could be particularly innovative
in the cybersecurity field for consumer world (Go-
vernment to Consumer (G2C)), with a combination
of integrated and complementary data encryption and
storage technologies and a platform for the represen-
tation and use of open and scalable data. Moreover,
the proposed e-voting system could favorite the en-
hancement of Open Data, also in economics terms, in
particular in case in which the elections are related to
market surveys.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2
shows an overview of related work. Section 3 we
propose our approach. Lastly, Section 4 includes the
conclusions and some reasoning about our work.
2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED
WORK
The project idea presented in this work can be placed
in the framework of the e-voting systems. The study
of the state of the art about already existent systems
for e-voting and in general about the rules which regu-
late the protection of results, encourages the research
of an alternative method based on the latest innovative
technologies. In the case of this proposal, we want to
exploit the peculiarities of the blockchain technology.
Blockchain technology is known for being the basis
of cryptocurrencies, such as the the Bitcoin system
(Nakamoto, 2008). The Bitcoin was the first cryp-
tocurrency system introduced and it is currently the
most important cryptocurrency in terms of capitali-
zation. Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized
data structure which records in chronological order a
specific typology of data called transactions. Block-
chain users interact with the blockchain by sending
transactions requests within a peer-to-peer network.
A transaction execution leads to the change of the
state of the blockchain. It is possible to define the
blockchain state as the set of information associated
to each user’s account (wallet) in a certain time.
The changes are collected and recorded within a
block, whose data is processed in order to calculate
a fingerprint called hash. The hash code of previous
block is also included in the current block hash cal-
culation, to make the whole chain actually unchan-
geable. Thanks to its technical characteristics, the
blockchain offers the security and transparency requi-
rements that so far lacked in the electronic voting sys-
tems adopted in various countries. It provides a toke-
nized trust mechanism, digital and decentralized, for
generating secure data, which potentially preserves
the anonymity of the participants but remains open
to public inspection. Applied to the voting process,
the blockchain technology guarantees that the votes
are accurately, transparently, permanently and safely
recorded.
Most of the largest and most popular blockchain
systems (i.e Bitcoin and Ethereum) are public. It me-
ans that all transactions stored in these blockchains
are publicly available. It is not possible to hide the
data set of each transaction that includes, the body of
the message (that is the IT description of the opera-
tion to be performed), the sender and the recipient. In
general, we speak of pseudo-anonymity because the
sender and recipient are known in terms of an alpha-
numeric code generally called ”address”. Using tra-
cing techniques could be possible infer their identity
(Pinna et al., 2018).
The literature offers various studies still ongoing
on the use of blockchain technology for voting sys-
tems. The characteristics of this technology allow, in
principle, to create decentralized and automatic vo-
ting systems. It is also true that the scientific research
is still far from reaching a definitive solution to create
an electronic voting system able to completely replace
traditional voting systems. The replacement process
could involve the study and the development of solu-
tions to overcome certain critical points, such as the
guarantee of the secrecy of the voter (Khan et al.,
2018; Rubtcova and Pavenkov, 2018).
New and emerging blockchain systems put confi-
dentiality and anonymity at the first place. In parti-
cular, Zcash
1
is a public blockchain system that im-
plements a system for privacy protection and that co-
des transactions to hide the sender, the recipient and
the content of the message. In order to guarantee the
data integrity and prevent frauds and cheats, Zcash
uses a zero-knowledge proof called zk-SNARK (Sas-
son et al., 2014). This algorithm aims to maintain
the record of balances. Proposed solutions for voting
systems based on blokchain, are still at a prototype
stage. One of these is Vote Coin
2
, announced in 2014
and still under development. It is a decentralized sy-
stem of electronic voting that exploits the characteris-
tics of Zcash in order to hide the link between elector
1
https://z.cash/
2
https://votecoin.site
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