A FRAMEWORK FOR ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEMS USING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGIES

ABSTRACT

In recent years, blockchain technology has been widely applied in the development of immutable and trustworthy solutions for different application areas. The traditional use of ballot boxes for election is gradually being overtaken by online voting to limit the issues of violence and malpractices in the electoral process but the risk involved in this method can be devastating in case of any loophole in the security of such systems. In this study, we proposed the use of blockchain technology (Ethereum and Smart contracts) with the SHA-256 cryptographic hash algorithm to encrypt users’ data both at the server side and user view for an electronic voting system. We implemented the framework using Java programming language, Netbeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) as the frontend with MySQL database as the backend. The proof-of-concept applied in this study shows that using blockchain technology can widely enhance the security in such systems, thereby improving the electoral process. In future works, we propose to test more cryptographic algorithms like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Eclipse Curve Cryptographic (ECC) and the SHA 512 hash algorithms on the system. The System Usability Scale (SUS) would be used for empirical analysis with existing systems for comparative analysis basis and to also identify the strengths and limitations of our system with existing systems.

Keywords: Block chain, e-voting systems, decentralized systems, SHA-246 Cryptography