SmartTeV—Leveraging eVoting with Smart Voting Ballots

Research and commercial approaches on electronic voting (e-Voting) exist and the recently emerged blockchain technology has given this research area yet another boost. However, one may claim that the actual deployment of e-Voting is at its infancy, mainly due to election integrity issues such as vote non-tampering, voter anonymity, and vote verifiability. The integration of cryptography and blockchain technology in a single framework could provide a solid foundation for secure, anonymous and still verifiable electronic voting. The TrustedEVoting (TeV) framework is a blockchain-based eVoting approach, which wraps not only the required key elements for secure and verifiable e-Voting but also additional features such as support for re-voting and post-election vote check, among others. This paper presents a novel feature to be integrated in TeV, the smart voting ballot, that implements a ranked-choice voting by allowing the voter to cast two votes: a primary vote and an alternative vote. The latter one is utilized in the case the primary vote went to an election party that didn’t reach the threshold. In this way, a more flexible voting scheme is available to a voter, mitigating the voter reluctancy to vote for smaller parties. In order to protect the voter’s privacy by not revealing trends/preferences/statistics regarding the two votes, an intelligent mechanism is in place that provides a privacy shield for the alternative votes not being used in the voting tallying.