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The Application of the Blockchain Technology in Voting Systems: A Review

Published: 17 April 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Voting is a formal expression of opinion or choice, either positive or negative, made by an individual or a group of individuals. However, conventional voting systems tend to be centralized, which are known to suffer from security and efficiency limitations. Hence, there has been a trend of moving to decentralized voting systems, such as those based on blockchain. The latter is a decentralized digital ledger in a peer-to-peer network, where a copy of the append-only ledger of digitally signed and encrypted transactions is maintained by each participant. Therefore, in this article, we perform a comprehensive review of blockchain-based voting systems and classify them based on a number of features (e.g., the types of blockchain used, the consensus approaches used, and the scale of participants). By systematically analyzing and comparing the different blockchain-based voting systems, we also identify a number of limitations and research opportunities. Hopefully, this survey will provide an in-depth insight into the potential utility of blockchain in voting systems and device future research agenda.

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Published In

cover image ACM Computing Surveys
ACM Computing Surveys  Volume 54, Issue 3
April 2022
836 pages
ISSN:0360-0300
EISSN:1557-7341
DOI:10.1145/3461619
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 17 April 2021
Accepted: 01 November 2020
Revised: 01 August 2020
Received: 01 March 2020
Published in CSUR Volume 54, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Blockchain
  2. E-voting
  3. blockchain-based voting systems
  4. privacy protection

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  • (2025)Enhancing Democratic Processes: A Survey of DRE, Internet, and Blockchain in Electronic Voting SystemsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2025.353134913(20512-20545)Online publication date: 2025
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