The Application of the Blockchain Technology in Voting Systems

Abstract

Voting is a formal expression of opinion or choice, either positive or negative, made by an individual or a group of individuals. However, conventional voting systems tend to be centralized, which are known to suffer from security and efficiency limitations. Hence, there has been a trend of moving to decentralized voting systems, such as those based on blockchain. The latter is a decentralized digital ledger in a peer-to-peer network, where a copy of the append-only ledger of digitally signed and encrypted transactions is maintained by each participant. Therefore, in this article, we perform a comprehensive review of blockchain-based voting systems and classify them based on a number of features (e.g., the types of blockchain used, the consensus approaches used, and the scale of participants). By systematically analyzing and comparing the different blockchain-based voting systems, we also identify a number of limitations and research opportunities. Hopefully, this survey will provide an in-depth insight into the potential utility of blockchain in voting systems and device future research agenda.