College - IIT Kanpur
Team members:-
Elections, referenda, and polls are very important processes & tools for the smooth operation of a modern democracy. Some of the key considerations from the voters' perspective are:
- Choice of candidate must remain secret
- Vote counting should be public and accountable but at the same time should be inaccessible during the voting period.
- Tamper proof by a third party
Problems with software based voting systems are :-
- A single voting server would not be able to handle the load from many votes being placed at once. We would need to use sharding or allow voters to place votes to one of many servers.
- As the number of voting servers increase, it becomes more difficult to ensure that no duplicate votes are placed across servers.
- An attacker could spoof a voting machine's signature over the network and place unauthorised votes.
To protect the virtue of democracy in our country, we would work on creating a web app that uses Microsoft AZURE's Blockchain technology. A basic overview of our idea is described below:
We plan to make 2 apps, one for voters who are not in their respected constituencies and other for those who can vote by going to their respective polling booths. First app will have major features as new voter registration and vote casting , first app will also be accessible to voters who are in their constituencies for new voter registration and to see details of candidates of his constituencies. Second app will be available at voting booths in Electronic Voting Machines wherein voters can cast their vote securely.
Major features of voter app will as follows :-
- Verification and Sign-In - Every eligible voter can verify by entering three compulsory field - Name, DoB, Aadhar Card number. An OTP will be sent to the number linked with person's Aadhar Card. After successful verification of the details, Voter ID will be generated and the applicant will be registered as a voter and will be given sign-in access to the app. Incase, the applicant doesn't meet the eligible age, the Voter ID will be generated once the applicant reach eligible age.
- Post Sign-In - After a successful registration or sign-in, the voter's application screen will be populated with a list of candidates of his/her constituency appearing in elections. Each candidate's profile would also be made available and he/she can update his constituency by Aadhar address verification.
- Directing the Voter to nearby Booth - On the voter app, voter will be given a notification of its near-by address of his/her voting centre at an interval of every one hour during the voting period . The voting process could only be done on voting centre because voting will work on a specific Wi-Fi network. This is made possible through the Geo-fencing.
Blockchain-based polling would be done by following procedure :-
- Blockchain EVM Initialisation - EVM installed at polling booth would be initialised before the starting of each election. It would receives a list of eligible voters for that region, as well as a unique key that is used to sign votes while casting them.
- Vote authentication - For vote authentication, we will use Asymmetric encryption as described in next section.
- Vote Accumulation - Shifting the voting machines to the Election commission is a problem. To solve this, we would store the votes in chunks locally until a stable connection is established. Chunking votes also makes it harder to place individual fraudulent votes from a rogue machine.
- Vote Casting - When enough votes accumulate and a stable internet connection is established, a chunk of votes is pushed to the delegated voting servers as explained in the next section.
- Vote Counting - Count of votes starts just after the voting period has ended and a detailed explaination of vote counting is described in the next section.
We will build a decentralized system with each constituency as a node and there will be a central node which stores the database of all the users and has no role in voting procedure. As soon as a new user is registered, the central node database and node of his/her constituency gets updated, thus if anyone registers from multiple constituencies, this is detected in the central node. This way, neither there is inconvenience for new voters nor will a voter be able to cast vote from multiple constituencies.
All of the data (data of voters and candidates) will be asymmetrically encrypted and decrypted via RSA algorithm & stored in multiple systems & this will make it impossible to tamper our data.
- Vote authentication - When a voter identifies themselves with a voter ID, it will verified against the local voter list in EVM, which is populated at the time of EVM initialisation. If the ID is present, a key-pair is generated for the voter, with the 'opening' private key stored against their name and the public key used to encrypt or 'seal' their vote choice. This choice along with additional Hashed biometric data is 'sealed' using public key and is then stored on the local ledger, ready to be sent to the central voting nodes.
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Vote Casting - Chunk of votes is pushed to the delegated voting servers. These chunks are signed by the EVM with the key that was created during initialisation.
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Vote Counting - When election period is closed, a signal is sent from delegate server to EVMs, requesting the 'opening' private keys for all the 'sealed' votes. Any votes that were placed by unauthorised EVMs would remain unopened as they would be unable to send opening values to the voting servers.
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With blockchain, votes could be verified right after the voting is finished, so that officials can be certain that the votes are counted correctly. This can be achieved without the need for a central body overseeing the results, as we currently have in the system.
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Each vote is conceptually equivalent to the asset in blockchain and transaction occurs between a voter and a contestant. Restrict asset to a process maximum of one transaction to potentially prevent multiple votes to the same candidate or voting for multiple contenders.
We will be using the Open Government Data Platform India' dataset. (Digital India initiative)
To create a Decentralised Application which will make the entire process of voting more secure, transparent, and efficient. The major problems which we want to remove are the following :
- To allow people to vote securely.
- To expedite the process of vote counting.
- To ensure that every citizen over 18 can vote without applying for a voters id.
- To ensure that vote tampering is not possible and render all such claims invalid.
- To allow people to vote even from another constituency where they are registered as a voter.
- Election Commission - the body which manages the election and declares the results .
- Voter - Person who his eligible to vote for a candidate .
- Setup - In this, the election commission may add the candidates and setup the election .
- Voting - This is the stage where voters can vote, and app will indicate whether a voter has voted or not
- Results - In this, Election Commission will count the votes and then declare the results .
A new Election smart contract may be created by the Election Commission (EC) and the name of the Election may be entered in the constructor. The initial state is the Setup State in which the EC has the permission to add candidates by invoking the function addCandidate. After the setup process is done, the EC may use the AllowVoting function to transition to the Voting Stage where the voter may vote for their favourite candidate. After voting, the voter will receive an email from the EC with the transaction id of the transaction which corresponds to their vote, which will allow them to be completely sure that their vote was properly registered. When the voting process is completed, the EC may calculate and declare the results by invoking the function ResCalc which expedites the process of vote counting. The winner of the election is shown in the table of the smart contract.
To ensure that every person who is 18 and above can vote, we can use the python script (Check_Voters.ipynb) to filter out and create a csv with only people who are 18 years old. Now this csv is added directly to Azure Active Directory (AD) which assigns an ethereum id to them so that the new voters are able to vote on the blockchain without explicitly doing anything for it. The Aadhar database can be used for this purpose and this process will have to be repeated before the elections.
- Azure Blockchain Workbench Used to create the decentralised application on the blockchain and contains the main logic for the election process. A configuration file (Election.json) and solidity file (Election.sol) was used to set up the app.
- Logic Apps This has been used to fully take advantage of the messaging API of Azure Blockchain Workbench to link it such that whenever the voting function is invoked in the workbench application, the transaction id of that transaction is sent to the voter who cast that vote. This transaction id can now be checked anytime to ensure that your vote is properly cast and thus render all claims of vote tampering invalid.
- Azure Active directory This has been used to keep track of all the voters and assign an ethereum id as a key value pair with their email id. Also, those who turn 18 are added to the Azure Active Directory and in this way no prospective voters are left out. A python script has been used to automatically find all those who turned 18 before the election and create a csv file. This csv file is now added directly to the Azure AD.