The Challenge
In this challenge, each team was tasked “to design a blockchain-compliant system for digital voting” to address the following aspects of an election: ensuring privacy and the ability to check the votes, protecting voting under duress, prohibiting publication of of interim results, supporting undecided voters and addressing any potential dispute in voting aftermath.
Each team had to prepare a 3000 word report describing their work in two weeks from September 15, 2016 to September 29, 2016 and then, they had a week to produce two videos for the challenge. One video describes their proposal in between 3 to 5 minutes and an elevator pitch clip no more than 2 minutes. The attendants were asked to provide a proof of concept implementation of their solution to demonstrate the feasibility of their proposal. It was an intense challenge to do all these within the short 2-3 weeks.
Our Solution
The Overview
we presented a proof-of-concept implementation of the Open Vote Network e-voting protocol as a self-enforcing voting algorithm over the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a decentralized peer to peer block chain that ensures execution of code as smart contracts. In our proposal, the blockchain is not only used as a bulletin board for publishing encrypted votes, but a trusted platform to verify all cryptographic data before they are published. Ethereum provides the opportunity to implement a self-tallying algorithm in the Open Vote network protocol as a smart contract so the correct execution of the algorithm is enforced by the consensus-based mechanism in Ethereum.
Our solution is designed for small scale e-voting over the internet. To support large-scale elections, we have suggested two further solutions, using the DRE-i and DRE-ip protocols for the centralized remote voting and centralized polling station voting respectively. Overall, our three suggested systems could fulfill all the challenge criteria. However, due to the space limit in the report, we focused on the small-scale voting over the Internet and only briefly covered the large-scale elections for both onsite and internet voting scenarios. We noted that the two top winning teams primarily focused on large-scale elections for onsite voting. An overview of our proposed algorithms is shown below:
Reports
Our full report could be accessed via here.
*UPDATE* The page on the Economist website is now unavailable but you can still have access to the reports via direct links below.
Furthermore, the videos we prepared for our competition are as follows:
The Pitch video
The Full video
Feedbacks
In the announcement of the winners (see the video in the above link), Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Kaspersky Lab and the sponsor of this competition, said: "Newcastle University’s (proposal) is the best solution in which remote voting is permitted."
Furthermore, Chi Onwurah MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central in the meeting with the winner team said:
“It was a great pleasure to meet and congratulate the team on their success in such an important competition.
Our changing society leaves us increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks, making cyber-security a fundamental challenge. I am so pleased to see Newcastle students making such a great contribution to protect our democracy.”
Acknowledgement
This project has been mentored by Dr. Feng Hao. A detailed paper giving a full account of this work has been submitted for journal publication.