Always on Voting: A Framework for Repetitive Voting on the Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper introduces Always on Voting, a blockchain-based framework enabling continuous voting and policy updates between elections, using cryptographic tools to ensure unpredictability and fairness in epoch timing.

Contribution

It presents a novel repetitive voting system that allows dynamic decision-making and mitigates peak-end bias through randomized epoch boundaries using blockchain and cryptographic techniques.

Findings

Enables voting updates at any time during epochs

Uses cryptographic methods to randomize epoch endpoints

Addresses peak-end effect in voting processes

Abstract

Elections repeat commonly after a fixed time interval, ranging from months to years. This results in limitations on governance since elected candidates or policies are difficult to remove before the next elections, if needed, and allowed by the corresponding law. Participants may decide (through a public deliberation) to change their choices but have no opportunity to vote for these choices before the next elections. Another issue is the peak-end effect, where the judgment of voters is based on how they felt a short time before the elections. To address these issues, we propose Always on Voting (AoV) -- a repetitive voting framework that allows participants to vote and change elected candidates or policies without waiting for the next elections. Participants are permitted to privately change their vote at any point in time, while the effect of their change is manifested at the end of each epoch, whose duration is shorter than the time between two main elections. To thwart the problem of peak-end effect in epochs, the ends of epochs are randomized and made unpredictable, while preserved within soft bounds. These goals are achieved using the synergy between a Bitcoin puzzle oracle, verifiable delay function, and smart contracts.