Practical I-Voting on Stellar Blockchain

• Main Authors: Stanisław Barański, Julian Szymański, Andrzej Sobecki, David Gil, Higinio Mora
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-10-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: blockchain; i-voting; stellar; blind signature
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/21/7606

In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving i-voting system based on the public Stellar Blockchain network. We argue that the proposed system satisfies all requirements stated for a robust i-voting system including transparency, verifiability, and voter anonymity. The practical architecture of the system abstracts a voter from blockchain technology used underneath. To keep user privacy, we propose a privacy-first protocol that protects voter anonymity. Additionally, high throughput and low transaction fees allow handling large scale voting at low costs. As a result we built an open-source, cheap, and secure system for i-voting that uses public blockchain, where everyone can participate and verify the election process without the need to trust a central authority. The main contribution to the field is a method based on a blind signature used to construct reliable voting protocol. The proposed method fulfills all requirements defined for i-voting systems, which is challenging to achieve altogether.