Electronic Voting Platform with Anonymous Blockchain Storage
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing electronic voting methods lack sufficient security guarantees, particularly in full-electronic voting systems, where voter identification, anonymity, and vote integrity are not adequately ensured, leading to mistrust and limited adoption in important elections.
Innovation Solution
An electronic voting platform utilizing a first and second management server, combined with Blockchain technology, ensures voter identification through strong authentication and anonymous voting, with votes stored in a Smart Contract on a Blockchain to prevent manipulation and enable secure, automatic counting.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional physical polling stations are used, then security and vote integrity are ensured, but cost and time efficiency deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces the mechanical system of physical polling stations, paper ballots, and manual counting with an electronic voting system using IT platforms, digital authentication, and automated vote processing. This substitution maintains security through cryptographic methods while dramatically improving efficiency and reducing costs.
2Productivity
If electronic voting platforms are used, then voting efficiency is improved, but security guarantees deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces cryptographic intermediaries including digital certificates, authentication tokens, and encrypted vote representations that mediate between the voter and the electronic voting system. These intermediaries ensure that while the voting process is electronic and efficient, security guarantees are maintained through mathematical cryptography rather than physical security measures.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transforms security from a physical parameter (presence of election officials, physical ballot control) to a cryptographic parameter (digital signatures, encryption keys, hash functions). This parameter change enables electronic voting to provide security guarantees equivalent to or exceeding traditional methods while improving efficiency.
3Ease of manufacture
If full electronic voting is implemented, then cost is reduced, but trust and verification capability deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements feedback mechanisms where voters receive cryptographic proof that their vote was correctly recorded and counted. The system provides verification capabilities through digital receipts and allows independent auditing of the voting process, creating a feedback loop that builds trust without requiring expensive physical infrastructure.
Data Source
Figure 1
AI summary
The present invention concerns the topic of electronic voting; that is, a voting method in which each voter can express his vote, even remotely, via an IT platform. This is a topic in which the interest is due to the fact that many electoral consultations represent quite complex events, because they mobilize a large number of people and must offer very high standards of security; consequently, they are significantly costly events. Electronic voting represents a way to reduce the costs of electoral consultations, to make them more efficient, and therefore also an instrument that can potentially be used more frequently. Moreover, an electoral consultation can be seen as a particular case of information management (a rather complex case, moreover) which, as such, should represent an almost natural, albeit challenging, field of application for information technologies. The proposed solution involves using at least a pair of servers configured to manage the voters and their votes separately, so as to allow, through an "Anonymous Kerberos" type approach, both the certain and reliable identification of the voters and the the anonymity of their vote: the latter is an essential guarantee to protect the freedom of voting. The voting platform indicated in the invention is configured to support a series of IT services combined in an original and complex way. In particular, the main state-of-the-art information technologies used by the invention concern encryption services as well as services based on "Blockchain" transactions. In a nutshell, the proposed voting platform provides that every step in which something must not be seen, this something is processed in an appropriately encrypted way, and in every circumstance in which something must not be manipulated, this something is stored in a "Blockchain".