BBB-Voting: 1-out-of-k Blockchain-Based Boardroom Voting

TL;DR

BBB-Voting introduces a blockchain-based decentralized voting system supporting multiple choices and robustness, reducing voter costs and scalable to large participant numbers, improving upon existing solutions like OVN.

Contribution

It extends existing blockchain voting frameworks to support 1-out-of-k choices and robustness, with a cost-optimized Ethereum implementation and scalability features.

Findings

Supports 1-out-of-k choices in blockchain voting.

Reduces voter costs by 13.5% compared to OVN.

Scalable to large participant numbers with sufficient resources.

Abstract

Voting is a means to agree on a collective decision based on available choices (e.g., candidates), where participants agree to abide by their outcome. To improve some features of e-voting, decentralized blockchain-based solutions can be employed, where the blockchain represents a public bulletin board that in contrast to a centralized bulletin board provides extremely high availability, censorship resistance, and correct code execution. A blockchain ensures that all entities in the voting system have the same view of the actions made by others due to its immutability and append-only features. The existing remote blockchain-based boardroom voting solution called Open Voting Network (OVN) provides the privacy of votes, universal & End-to-End verifiability, and perfect ballot secrecy; however, it supports only two choices and lacks robustness enabling recovery from stalling participants. We present BBB-Voting, an equivalent blockchain-based approach for decentralized voting such as OVN, but in contrast to it, BBB-Voting supports 1-out-of-$k$ choices and provides robustness that enables recovery from stalling participants. We make a cost-optimized implementation using an Ethereum-based environment respecting Ethereum Enterprise Alliance standards, which we compare with OVN and show that our work decreases the costs for voters by 13.5% in normalized gas consumption. Finally, we show how BBB-Voting can be extended to support the number of participants limited only by the expenses paid by the authority and the computing power to obtain the tally.