IOTA as Backbone in eVoting Research

A new EPSRC research project led by the cryptographer Dr. Bingsheng Zhang at the University of Lancaster will utilize the public distributed ledger of IOTA as a backbone for its novel ambition of an end-to-end verifiable electronic voting bulletin board on top of a secure and tamper-proof decentralized architecture.

A participant and advisor to the research effort is the pioneering company Cybernetica AS from Estonia. The company is recognized around the world for its seminal role in the field of offering voting over the Internet. Cybernetica enabled Estonia to become the world’s first nation to hold legally binding general elections in municipalities over the Internet since 2005, and again the world’s first parliamentary elections since 2007. Their immense experience and expertise will be of great importance for advising on this project.

The IOTA Foundation will assist Bingsheng and his team with issues pertaining to the implementation of the IOTA ledger and its modules in this research initiative. Members of the IOTA Foundation have a rich history of leading the way in utilizing Distributed Ledger Technology(DLT) in the realm of voting. Nxt’s Voting implementation developed in 2013 was the world’s first voting implementation on blockchain in general, and PublicVotes in 2015 was the first voting implementation on the Ethereum blockchain. We are happy to be part of and assist this project to bring e-Voting to the cutting edge of DLT by going beyond blockchain through IOTA’s Tangle ledger.

About the recently granted research project, which is slated to begin its research officially in July professor Bingsheng Zhang said the following:

The state-of-the-art e-voting systems, such as DEMOS, can achieve end-to-end verifiability in the standard model, but those systems can only support basic vote tally schemes due to their technical limitation — homomorphic tally. This project aims to develop an end-to-end verifiable e-voting system that is able to support rich ballot structures and all known voting/tally schemes. The technology and infrastructure developed by IOTA will play an important role in the resulting system, which can facilitate both vote collection and universal audibility during an e-voting process.