Introduction¶
Colorvote is an experimental project intended to solve some of the problems that many current voting systems face. Voting systems must be held to very high standards, to ensure free and fair elections. But traditional voting systems are not perfect, once the ballot is dropped into the box, we have no guarantee that it will be correctly counted. Anonimity is also a big concern, so that voters can’t be bribed or threatened to vote in a particular way.
Electronic Voting¶
Electronic voting can be divided in two categories:
- Electronic voting machines and counting machines
- Electronic voting over the internet (online voting)
Electronic voting machines have been used in many elections, but they face the same problems as before, and may introduce new ones. For example there have been issues with counting machines not counting correctly, and voting machines that sometimes flip the vote.
Online voting has been used in a few elections, but most methods that have been used have been found to contain security problems by experts. In Estonia, parliament elections have offered online voting since 2005.
See Tom Scott - Why Electronic Voting is Still a Bad Idea
Requirements¶
The following requirements for electronic voting systems are defined in (Rura et al, 2016).
- Privacy: Keeping the votes secret.
- Eligibility: Allowing only registered voters to vote.
- Improvabiliy: Voters should be unable to prove to others who they voted for.
- Convenience: Everyone should be able to vote with minimal effort.
- Verifiability: Users should be able to trust the tallying process.
Colored Coins¶
Colored coins are a class of methods for representing assets on a blockchain. Normally when funds are transferred on a blockchain, there is no way to distinguish them like with serial numbers on bills. In order to make coins distinguishable, we encode additional data in transactions. The method that is used to encode this data is known as a coloring scheme (see The Protocol). By coloring coins we can also make them represent real-world assets, such as stocks, access codes, movie tickets or votes.
Electoral Systems¶
An electoral system is the set of rules that determines how elections are conducted and their results determined. The rules differ in many ways between governments, organizations and other bodies that conduct elections. The aim of colorvote is to provide flexibility on how elections are conducted.
The simplest electoral system is first-past-the-post (FPTP), where each voter can only vote for one candidate, and the candidate who gets the most votes wins.