Problematics of online voting

Although online voting is gaining in popularity, it presents new challenges.

First, most online voting services are centralized solutions that are fully managed by the operator. Such solutions may be comprehensively protected from external threats, but theoretically give their developer access to the votes being organized. Accordingly, the operating company can somehow interfere in the voting process or obtain information about the results. This creates a trust problem between the organizer of the voting, its participants, and the service company.

The problem of trust is solved by creating a decentralized system that meets two basic criteria:

  • only the organizer and participants have access to the voting process and the results;

  • only the participant has access to his or her own ballot.

One of the technical solutions allowing to implement such a system is blockchain - a system of data storage and transfer in the form of a successive chain of interconnected blocks. Each block contains the hash sum of the data of the previous block. This makes it impossible to subsequently change the content of any of the blocks, since it is necessary to change the content of the blocks throughout the chain at all nodes.

The blockchain-based system does not have a single control center; all data is stored simultaneously on all nodes in the network, either open or encrypted. This ensures the security and integrity of transmitted data, minimizing the possibility of forging.

The use of modern encryption algorithms and rules for handling sensitive data, along with the blockchain technology, protects the system as much as possible from possible attacks.

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