Blockchain-Based E-Voting System for Elections in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Electronic voting systems have been an area of interest in a modern democracy for over a decade. With the advancement of technologies to enable the development of e-voting systems, multiple countries have already attempted to use e-voting for public elections with a certain degree of success. E-voting systems are identified as not only an approach to improve time and monetary efficiency, but also to improve voter participation for elections. With the emergence of blockchain technology, it is identified as an advanced alternative technology for developing e-voting systems because of its highly secure decentralized nature with integrity and auditability by design. The Smart Contracts in blockchain provides an ideal approach to develop the core logic of e-voting systems as it is an integral part of the blockchain system itself. Most of the existing research literature is focused on public blockchains. Private blockchains, also called permissioned blockchains, provides an alternative blockchain solution that addresses some of the limitations such as the performance, scalability, and legal concerns, identified through the researches on public blockchains. This research aims to design and develop an e-voting system for the context of Sri Lankan elections on a private blockchain to evaluate and understand the applicability of private blockchains for designing e-voting systems. For the scope of the research, the context of the Sri Lankan election is considered and the Hyperleder Fabric is selected as the private blockchain platform. This research presents a detailed architectural design with a reference implementation on the Hyperledger Fabric private blockchain platform. This proposed solution utilizes the blockchain features to implement e-voting system logic through Smart Contracts and consists of a REST API layer to provide access to consumers. This system is capable of scaling to handle a large number of voters and to satisfy desired properties of e-voting systems. The results obtained through the evaluations confirm the adherence of the system with desired properties of e-voting systems and the capability of handling large voter counts. This research successfully concludes the applicability of private blockchain to develop e-voting systems for general elections.