Abstract:
"
Modern democracies are built on the foundation of elections, and a voting system is the
core component for the citizens to exercise their rights. Countries all over the world use
some form of voting methods to achieve democracy. Even though elections are vital to
the democratic process, their integrity is constantly challenged around the world. Voter
fraud and voter suppression are main two concerns when an election is held and its
often not fully preventable, but it can be reduced to a greater extent. Voter suppression
is termed as discouraging or preventing a citizen to vote for the election. There are
several blockchain based e-voting protocols, but all the existing protocols only focus
on the voter fraud aspect that is ensuring a voter is anonymous or a vote is casted
anonymously and verified but there are no e-voting protocols that have considered the
voter suppression aspect. This research will be the first to highlight voter suppression
and build a protocol that will ensure that voter suppression can be identified. It is
identified that centralized registration process has often paved the path for voter
suppression. The proposed protocol will ensure that the voter registration process is
decentralized and using blockchain it will ensure storing the voter suppression related
data and thus the data cannot be tampered. The proposed solution offers to provide a
transparent, verifiable, trustable, and unbiased e-voting protocol using blockchain
which will enhance the election integrity. "
