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BUIP129: Finish and Productize the BU voting system
Proposer: Andrew Stone
Submitted on: 2019-08-11
Status: passed

Summary

Currently the BU voting process simply requires that every user sign a
vote. This BUIP allocates resources to evolve this process into a
fully-fledged voting system that could be easily adopted by external
organizations, integrated with or closely related to the Bitcoin Cash
blockchain. This BUIP requests a person-year of work in funding to allow
us to bring a developer on for a longer time frame than is normally
possible via small projects. This should make this effort attractive to
a larger set of possible candidates.

End Goal, User Perspective

A website allowing an external entity to register and manage a vote.
This website will be open source and easily cloned and customized by
institutions that want a dedicated site.

A mobile “Activity” (embeddable in any mobile app) that handles voting,
connecting to any registered entity. Embed this activity into an app
that integrates with the website described above.

Voting System Requirements

Hjálmarsson, et. al provides a summary of voting requirements:

(i) An election system should not enable coerced voting.

(ii) An election system should not enable traceability of a vote to a
voters identifying credentials.

(iii) An election system should ensure and proof to a voter, that the
voters vote, was counted, and counted correctly.

(iv) An election system should not enable control to a third party to
tamper with any vote.

(v) An election system should not enable a single entity control over
tallying votes and determining an elections result.

(vi) An election system should only allow eligible individuals to vote
in an election

In a digital era, additional requirements and modifications to these
requirements may be needed. A weaker form of requirement (v) may be
acceptable:

(v.1) A single tallying entity must be able to prove inclusion of
individuals’ votes, and the non-existence of fake votes.

A stronger (or perhaps simply a clearer) form of i is needed to
discourage selling of votes – in traditional voting, someone can pay a
voter to vote a certain way, but cannot verify what vote is actually
cast. This inability to verify discourages direct vote purchases:

(i.2) An election system should not enable coerced voting. Even with the
cooperation of the voter, a dishonest voter should be able to plausibly
claim different vote choices (unless vote delegation is explicitly
desired within the voting system).

Technology

This section discusses an approach with the purpose of showing that a
robust voting system can be achieved. The technologies are here. But the
final system may change based on careful reading of prior work.

Identity: An external entity is assumed to validate identity and
associate a public key with a voter in a manner beyond the scope of this
document.

Creating a vote & registering: A UTXO (OP_RETURN annotated for public
blockchains, or a first class token) is sent to every voter per vote.
The UTXO is optionally sent to every voter or a prospective voter needs
to ask for one.

Anonymity: Before voting opens, these UTXOs are mixed (automatically via
user’s apps) via cash shuffle ideally with Schnorr input aggregation
(which may be coming soon in bitcoin cash).

Opening a vote: After a period of time voting opens. Votes are cast
using cash shuffle, by sending the shuffled UTXO to an output address
that corresponds to the vote choice. Even if a user skips step 3, at
least one cash shuffle round offers some anonymity, so long as the
outputs go to multiple choices.

Votes are tallied using a merkle tree. Voting apps can query the
tallying entity and receive a merkle proof that a vote was part of the
tally. Requesting the merkle proof could deanonymize the requester to
the contents of the final cash shuffle voting transaction. To further
preserve anonymity, request multiple proofs for random voting
transactions. Doing so also probabilistically checks the honesty of the
tally.

On a public blockchain, anyone can create a full tally, fully verifying
any “official” tally.

Observations

These protocols could be run on a public blockchain, private blockchain
or no blockchain at all (just a sequence of dependent transactions). The
disadvantage of a public blockchain is in data management. For major
elections, this generates lots of data, potentially wasting blockchain
space. For small votes, the opposite may be a problem – requiring that
tally machines sift through a huge amount of blockchain data for a few
votes.

But in the no blockchain case, a set of attackers could claim their
votes were not included by not publishing a voting transaction and then
presenting the transaction after the fact. This is avoided by requiring
cash shuffle, since a single few input few output vote would be
suspicious, but would be fixed by committing all voting transaction
hashes to an (unrelated) public blockchain to prove existence.

The private blockchain solution presumes that the entities that assemble
blocks won’t censor transactions.

Another issue is that an attacker could refuse to sign a cashshuffle
operation in which any output tx votes differently, but this would
simply isolate votes into different transactions. It may be useful to
commit to a vote and then reveal it later, but this may also just defer
censorship to the reveal stage.

Prior Work

There is a medium amount. Some of this effort will be culling
interesting ideas from prior work. However, much of the prior work
expects a Ethereum style smart contract system or a custom blockchain,
whereas this BUIP proposes the creation of a solution that uses Bitcoin
Cash technologies.

Blockchain-Based E-Voting System, Friðrik Þ. Hjálmarsson et.al:
https://skemman.is/bitstream/1946/31161/1/Research-Paper-BBEVS.pdf

Secure Digital Voting System based on Blockchain Technology, Khan et.
al.:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c1f0/b096f9ce1b17bea2d39ee760aaede9829d29.pdf

ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEMUSING BLOCKCHAIN Ganji, et. al.:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/84c7/c5b9df300d5d282038684654e2d47998b3dd.pdf

(but incomplete IMHO since it “solves” voter anonymity in a trusted
centralized manner)