Sancus: an Anonymous and Trustworthy Blockchain-based Electronic Voting Architecture

The high cost of contemporary in-person voting, prolonged ballot counting, stringent voter availability requirements, and result unreliability have motivated the design and development of the new breed of electronic voting (e-voting) systems. The emerging e-voting systems, ranging from standalone electronic voting machines to automated Internet-based systems, aim at promoting better accessibility for disabled voters, faster ballot counting, and voting verifiability. However, the majority of the existing e-voting systems cannot satisfy all the aforementioned properties and are often vulnerable to breaching voters' anonymity. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose Sancus -a blockchain-based electronic voting architecture. Sancus meets the primary criteria of fair voting by providing features, such as voter authentication and anonymity, along with voting reliability and result verifiability. We will discuss Sancus's design and its proof-of-concept implementation in BigchainDB. We will further present its throughput measurements in a small testbed. In the future, we plan to augment Sancus's design and further implementing it on a more prominent blockchain and conduct a large-scale evaluation.