Voting over a distributed ledger: An interdisciplinary perspective

Amrita Dhillon (), Grammateia Kotsialou, Peter McBurney and Luke Riley
Additional contact information
Grammateia Kotsialou: King’s College London
Peter McBurney: King’s College London
Luke Riley: King’s College London

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: This work discusses the potential of a blockchain based infrastructure for a decentralised online voting platform. When compared to paper based voting, online voting can vastly increase the speed that votes can be counted, expand the overall accessibility of the election system and decrease the cost of turnout. Yet despite these advantages, online voting for political office is subject to fraud at various levels due to its centralised nature. In this paper, we describe a general architecture of a centralised online voting system and detail which areas of such a system are vulnerable to electoral fraud. We then proceed to introduce the key ideas underlying blockchain technology as a decentralised mechanism that can address these problems. We discuss the advantages and weaknesses of the blockchain technology, the protocols the technology uses and what criteria a good blockchain protocol should satisfy (depending on the voting application). We argue that the decentralisation inherent in the blockchain technology could increase the public’s trust in national elections, as well as eliminate voter impersonation and double voting. We conclude with a discussion regarding how economists and social scientists can collaborate with the blockchain community in a research agenda on the design of efficient blockchain protocols and new voting systems such as liquid democracy.

Keywords: JEL; Classification: (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-des, nep-pay and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... 416-2019_dhillon.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Voting over a Distributed Ledger: An interdisciplinary perspective (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:416

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().