E-Voting System on Blockchain

When we hear the word 'democracy', the concepts like -right to choose, respect for individual rights, freedom of speech, regular and fair elections etc are the most common ones that arise in one's mind.The constitutional laws have been designed in such a way that the features of democracy stand preserved.But, there always is a slight deviation between what's written on the paper and when it's implemented in the real world.Etymologically, democracy means a system of government where common people hold the political power.Yet the way the democratic practices are administered, still carries a huge burden of accusations and objections, and the term 'democracy' tops the list of the most indiscriminately abused terms in history.Although its structure and methodologies have greatly transformed since the beginning but the remarkable indicia of democracy -the elections, are still frowned upon and for no bad reasons.A free and fair election is one of the most fundamental pillars that supports the democratic system.The foundation of the democracy lies in the fact that common people have the right to choose their candidate and rule through the elected representative.And this foundation, up until today with so much advancement in technology, fails to mark its presence.We have built buildings taller than mountains, we've made computers that work faster than a picosecond and when it comes to develop a flawless and a reliable system for elections, what are we up to -electorate manipulation, bought votes, ballot stuffing, sabotaged EVMs, ridged elections?The process of elections is the heart of every democracy and thus demand a great deal of security and privacy to preserve their fairness.In fact, the election security is a matter of national concern.But, in spite of all the mindfulness and cautions, we still fail to conduct secure and fair elections and not only in India but across the globe.From the dawn of the democratic elections, the process of conducting elections has been practiced via paper ballots.Ballot is a system of elections in which the voter marks the candidate he/she wishes to choose on a piece of paper, known as a ballot paper.These ballot papers are then collected and the votes for each candidate are tallied up manually to form the result.This system had some major drawbacks because counting the votes manually does not account for human error and also, it can be easily tampered with.They were heavily criticised because of various news of fraudulent votes and captured booths.Another major drawback it suffered was the 'Spoilt votes' -where the voter's vote cannot be counted due to improper marking on the paper or when there was a case of multiple marks by the voter.So, the system was fault tolerant neither from the voter's side, nor from the perspective of the administration.It was critical to replace this system with something else to regulate fraud and to develop a truly robust system of elections.Fortunately, moving on to a new approach for conducting elections via a device called Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) gave some relief.It wasn't any longer until came to light the cases of faulty and corrupted EVMs.And the allegations thrown at the EVMs cannot be claimed as false because after all, the system is centralised and anyone, to whom the EVM is physically accessible, can easily sabotage the EVM and the voters' privacy and right to choose are jeopardised.And we circled right back to the starting point.The cases of tainted EVMs pushed several countries back to the ballot system.Countries like Netherlands, Finland, Germany etc believe that there are various security issues with the Electronic Voting Machines and claim that the risks of EVMs outweigh its benefits.The bitter truth about democracy is -'Security is the biggest lie in a democracy'.And the big questions still remain unanswered: How can we secure our elections?How can we design a truly secure and trust-less voting system without giving a central authority, full control over the process?The answer is 'Blockchain'. A. What is a Blockchain?In I.T. systems, a lot of data is generated and it must be stored somewhere in an organised way.These organised collections of data are known as databases.In sectors like financial systems, healthcare systems or E-commerce websites etc where data belonging to various users is generated every second, and the confidentiality of data is a matter of concern, then the following questions arise: 1) Where the database must be located?If at an allegedly-claimed-as-secure central location, then why? 2) Who should decide the rules for writing the data into the database?