Authors: Jun Huang, Debiao He, Mohammad S. Obaidat, Pandi Vijayakumar, Min Luo, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo
Title: The Application of the Blockchain Technology in Voting Systems: A Review
Journal: ACM Computing Surveys

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 (P2P) network, where a copy of the append-only ledger of digitally signed and encrypted transactions is maintained by each participant. Therefore, in this paper, 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.

投票是一个人或一群人对积极或消极的意见或选择的正式表达。然而，传统的投票系统往往是中心化的，中心化的投票系统在安全和效率方面的限制是众所周知的。因此，近年来出现了转向去中心化投票系统的研究趋势，例如基于区块链的投票系统。区块链是点对点(P2P)网络中去中心化的数字账本，其中由数字签名和加密交易组成的只追加账本由每个参与者维护。在本文中，我们对基于区块链的投票系统进行了全面的回顾，并根据多个特征(例如使用的区块链类型、使用的共识算法和参与者规模)对其进行了分类。通过系统地分析和比较不同的区块链投票系统，我们也发现了一些局限性和研究机会。希望我们研究能让读者更深入的了解区块链投票系统，也让大家在投票系统和设备的未来研究议程中，找到区块链的潜在效用。