## 1 Introduction  
The democratic election process is a critical component of governance for systems ranging from small local governments and corporations to major national and international organizations. Democracies rely on the election process to give an equal voice to each of their members or citizens; however, traditional election schemes consisting of paper ballots are flawed in several ways. Firstly, traditional paper ballot elections require voters to visit physical polling centers. Many of these polling locations are not designed to ensure fair and equal access to all. For example, long lines and limited wheelchair access discourage voters from participating [1]. Secondly, traditional paper ballot elections do not scale well for large voter populations so it can take days or weeks for election results to be processed. Thirdly, traditional ballot elections are difficult to audit for manipulation. Traditional elections typically rely on third parties to perform poll-watching or conduct surveys (i.e., exit polling) to identify inconsistencies and increase public trust of the election results. However, these methods fail to produce perfect traceability of elections and can themselves be corrupted [2]. The difficulty of maintaining trust and accountability in elections increases for large elections where thousands of individuals are relied upon and can act maliciously or make consequential mistakes. As a result the chances of lost or falsified ballots increases [3]. To solve these issues, governments, academic researchers, and private companies have proposed moving to an electronic voting (e-voting) scheme [4]. E-voting is a voting process in which voters can submit their votes using computers or even smart phones without the need of traditional paper ballots [4]. E-voting aims to solve the aforementioned issues by allowing anyone including people who struggle with mobility due to age or disability to vote safely and conveniently from their homes. In addition, e-voting schemes can save time tallying votes [5]. Moreover, an e-voting scheme can provide more secure and accountable elections by introducing logging schemes as a countermeasure to prevent fraudulent behavior and vote manipulations. Unlike paper ballots, e-voting can allow for the automated generation of immutable audit trails that can be leveraged to validate election integrity. While e-voting schemes have the potential to solve issues associated with traditional paper ballot elections, the majority of the current e-voting schemes rely on a central third party to run the election [6; 7; 8]. This makes them vulnerable to single-point-of-failure attacks as well as privacy concerns of submitted votes by both internal and external attackers [9; 10; 11]. They are vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS) and Sybil attacks launched by malicious users and external attackers. To address the limitations of centralized e-voting schemes, many researchers have proposed using the blockchain to host an e-voting scheme [12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18]. The blockchain technology, at its core, contains a ledger, or transaction history, that follows an append-only scheme. Due to the immutable structure of the ledger, the use of a blockchain would naturally deter vote tampering and manipulation. This is because previous votes written to the ledger cannot be overwritten or changed. A set-in-stone timeline is created as the election takes place, recording every encrypted vote and action taken on the blockchain. However, the majority of existing implemented blockchain-based voting schemes are based on public blockchains, which could result in privacy issues as the votes are easily available to the public if additional measures such as vote encryption are not implemented [16]. In [5; 17], the Ethereum blockchain is used, which posts votes publicly, providing no election privacy. While [17] utilizes encryption of votes to protect voter privacy, [5] provides no such safeguard. This transparency sacrifices privacy to allow for an easily auditable scheme.