Public beta testing of Waves Enterprise e-voting service launched

The service will leverage all the advantages of blockchain technology while retaining traditional voting rules and processes.

Voting is a vital tool for corporate decision making, but in its traditional form it is neither sufficiently convenient nor protected from tampering and rigged elections.

Additionally, one of the main reasons for poor turnout at shareholder meetings is the restricted voting period and lack of ability to cast votes remotely.

Collection and storage of votes by a single, centralized authority poses potential risks due to lack of proper protection from hacking attacks and manipulation. Even measures such as geographical distribution between data processing centers, maintaining multiple copies of data, logging all actions in the system and administrative measures aimed at stepping up security cannot fully protect the system from unauthorized access and possible falsification of voting results.

Blockchain advantages

Electronic voting based on blockchain technology, along with a set of modern cryptographic algorithms, solves these problems. Once cast and recorded on the blockchain, a vote cannot be altered or cancelled, and every voter can view all voting-related transactions to confirm that their vote has been counted. Each participant’s vote is encrypted, which ensures confidentiality: information about which option they voted for is not made public.

Meanwhile, only identified users who have the appropriate rights can access the service. All participants’ actions are automatically verified by a smart contract and recorded to a distributed registry.

Each user’s vote is encrypted, ensuring confidentiality. All choices made by users remain private. Results are stored and calculated in a decentralized way.

Thus, a secure contour without a centralized vote counting authority is created. The blockchain’s consensus algorithm allows each user to obtain the same version of the truth.

Thanks to this approach, overheads are considerably reduced, since the costs of organizing a meeting, and printing and mailing paper ballots, are eliminated. Notifications and ballots are instantly delivered to any location around the world, and the vote counting process is faster and simpler.

As a result of using a blockchain-based service, turnout and trust in the voting process are increased.

Waves Enterprise’s solution

Waves Enterprise offers a blockchain-based voting service launched for public beta testing with no restrictions on functionality and available to anyone for free. You can register for the service and hold your first vote on the blockchain here: https://voting.wavesenterprise.com

The service’s potential users include any organization in which decisions are made based on voting. Primarily, this means limited and public companies, and banking and financial institutions.

The solution will also work for self-regulating organizations, such as condominiums and property management companies, as well as for various competitions. In future, the solution’s functionality will be expanded, making it suitable for local and municipal elections.

The service facilitates running a registry of an organization’s meetings, formulating the agenda and attaching materials, and sending out notifications of a meeting (including changes to the agenda).

Each participant receives a digital version of a voting ballot and can make sure their vote has been counted. Votes are counted automatically, and the results are written to the blockchain, after which a final summary is created and sent to participants.

The Waves Enterprise network’s blockchain architecture, based on PoS and PoA consensus algorithms, facilitates processing of more than 1,000 transactions per second, enabling large-scale voting events.

One of the main challenges for the team was to make the interface as convenient and understandable as possible for the average user, bringing it as close as possible to working in a regular information system.

The service will be available both as a public service and as an in-house installation for corporate customers.

How it works

The initiator of the vote creates a meeting, defines all possible answers, adds explanations and a list of participants, and sets the dates for voting.

A participant receives an electronic ballot with poll questions. Once voting has started, they choose between the options offered in the user interface for each question.

Overall, the voting process is very similar to marking options on a printed ballot and casting it into the ballot box. In this case, however, the blockchain acts as the ‘ballot box’, ensuring the immutability of every vote cast.

Once a digital ballot has been completed, it is encrypted using special algorithms and written to the blockchain. A ballot is therefore a transaction with encrypted answers and a series of proofs to ensure that neither the voter nor the system have tampered with them.

Voters’ choices are encrypted with a key that is generated separately for each event. This key is created from several independent encryption server keys in such a way that a secret pair for this key cannot be determined. Meanwhile if, for instance, seven encryption servers are required to encrypt a key, only five will be required to decrypt it.

ElGamal encryption is used for each ballot. A transaction containing an encrypted vote is written to the blockchain. Thanks to this, it is possible to see which users have cast their votes, but information on the specific choices they have made is not available.

The voting results are also decrypted using homomorphic encryption. Each server adds the encrypted ballots and decrypts the results of the addition, removing its encryption layer, and writes the results to the blockchain, while the master server then checks them and provides the overall results of the vote.

At all stages, two types of proofs are created and recorded — proofs that votes have not been tampered with once cast, and that encrypted votes are in a certain range (range proofs).

Participants can monitor their ballots in the ‘ballot box’ to make sure that their votes have been counted. Every participant can check each ballot in the box without disclosing the identities of voters.

Once the voting period is over, all ballots are processed and totalled. Cryptography ensures confidentiality, so no specific voter’s choices are revealed. Voting results can be presented in a required report form.

In subsequent articles, we’ll discuss the solution’s architecture and cryptography in more detail.

Give your feedback

We always strive for the best and want to provide the optimal user experience. If you have any problems while using our service or would like to improve something, please contact us at support@wavesenterprise.com.

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