The platform decouples a voter’s identity from their vote using ZCash cryptocurrency and the Zero-Knowledge Proof method.
Trinity College Dublin’s (TCD) Applied Cryptography Research Lab has developed an electronic voting system that utilises blockchain technology to preserve privacy while allowing for a transparent audit.
The ZKBallot platform decouples a voter’s identity from their vote using ZCash, a privacy preserving cryptocurrency and Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP), an advanced cryptography mechanism which allows you to prove something without needing to share any unnecessary information.
Elaborating on ZKPs, Hitesh Tewari, an assistant professor at TCD and the principal investigator at the research lab, says that the mechanism, in essence, can be used to prove that a voter is allowed to vote without revealing their identity.
Voting using the ZKBallot works similarly to other existing e-voting systems where voters receive an email link, which they can use to select their preferred candidate in order to cast the vote.
However, this system preserves the voters’ identities by converting their votes into ZCash tokens issued to a shielded address, meaning the system does not know where the issued tokens went. This way, the vote cannot be traced back to the person who cast it.
“[We] break the link between the voter and the token itself… and we don’t allow anybody, even the system doesn’t know who got which token and who cast which [token] where,” Tewari explains.
Through the platform, voters can pick their preferred candidate by giving them their issued token. ZKBallot transfers this token to the candidates’ transparent address, meaning the identity of the candidate is known.
Simply put, while the identity of the voter is unknown, it is transparent where the vote went.
“We know that some person – which we don’t know [who] – has transferred a token into one of the candidates’ wallets, and we know which candidate that’s for,” says Tewari.
ZKBallot is a free-to-use platform and does not require any specialised hardware of software to be installed by end users.
This TCD-created system only works in closed environments, where the identities and the exact number of all the voters is already known – such as boardrooms, clubs or university elections.
The platform, just a few days old, is yet to be used in any of these situations, Tewari tells SiliconRepublic.com.
While this is a smaller scale platform, Tewari argues that these could be applied to a larger population, such as state-wide elections – however, not anytime soon.
“There are mechanisms that we can employ to generalise this for a much bigger population whereby you could have some sort of a Zero-Knowledge Proof given to each – let’s say – citizen[s] of the country.
“And what they would do is they’d use that Zero-Knowledge Proof to prove that they are allowed to vote in this election without revealing their identity,” he says.
This type of system is slowly gaining popularity with many looking to the blockchain for privacy-preserving applications. Moreover, according to Tewari, knowing the exact number of private tokens issued also means that blockchain-led elections could negate cybersecurity and transparency risks.
Elections in Ireland are still cast on paper ballots. While several countries around the world have adopted e-voting over the years – a system which is widely considered to reduce counting errors and ballot tampering – certain concerns still remain.
With newer, more secure electronic voting technology on the rise, the question still remains on when Ireland might considering upgrading.
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