FASTEN: Fair and Secure Distributed Voting Using Smart Contracts

TL;DR

FASTEN is a blockchain-based voting protocol that ensures privacy, fairness, and security in distributed elections, overcoming scalability issues and vote concealment challenges of existing smart contract solutions.

Contribution

It introduces FASTEN, a scalable smart contract protocol that preserves voter privacy, prevents double voting, and maintains election integrity on blockchain platforms.

Findings

FASTEN guarantees vote concealment and privacy with negligible breach probability.

The cost of implementing FASTEN on Ethereum is comparable to traditional election costs.

FASTEN effectively prevents double voting and ensures election immutability.

Abstract

Electing democratic representatives via voting has been a common mechanism since the 17th century. However, these mechanisms raise concerns about fairness, privacy, vote concealment, fair calculations of tally, and proxies voting on their behalf for the voters. Ballot voting, and in recent times, electronic voting via electronic voting machines (EVMs) improves fairness by relying on centralized trust. Homomorphic encryption-based voting protocols also assure fairness but cannot scale to large scale elections such as presidential elections. In this paper, we leverage the blockchain technology of distributing trust to propose a smart contract-based protocol, namely, \proto. There are many existing protocols for voting using smart contracts. We observe that these either are not scalable or leak the vote tally during the voting stage, i.e., do not provide vote concealment. In contrast, we show that FASTEN preserves voter's privacy ensures vote concealment, immutability, and avoids double voting. We prove that the probability of privacy breaches is negligibly small. Further, our cost analysis of executing FASTEN over Ethereum is comparable to most of the existing cost of elections.