Are Voters Willing to Collectively Secure Elections? Unraveling a Practical Blockchain Voting System

2025-10-09

AI Summary

Addressing the challenge of simultaneously achieving strong confidentiality and verifiability in decentralized large-scale e-voting, this paper proposes a Collective Security Voting (CSV) mechanism wherein voters voluntarily serve as secret holders to collaboratively preserve ballot secrecy. CSV integrates threshold cryptography, blockchain, and smart contracts to ensure end-to-end verifiability and collusion-resistant privacy. Its user interface abstracts cryptographic complexity, significantly lowering the barrier for non-technical users. The key innovation lies in the first incorporation of voters themselves into the confidentiality maintenance loop—departing from conventional paradigms reliant on trusted third parties or fixed validator nodes—thereby enhancing scalability and real-world deployability without compromising cryptographic security. Empirical user studies demonstrate high voter participation willingness, reliable key shard release, and strong perceived security, validating CSV’s effectiveness and practicality in authentic election settings.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Voting
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / Voting
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Ensuring ballot secrecy is critical for fair and trustworthy electronic voting systems, yet achieving strong secrecy guarantees in decentralized, large-scale elections remains challenging. This paper proposes the concept of collectively secure voting, in which voters themselves can opt in as secret holders to protect ballot secrecy. A practical blockchain-based collectively secure voting system is designed and implemented. Our design strikes a balance between strong confidentiality guarantees and real-world applicability. The proposed system combines threshold cryptography and smart contracts to ensure ballots remain confidential during voting, while all protocol steps remain transparent and verifiable. Voters can use the system without prior blockchain knowledge through an intuitive user interface that hides underlying complexity. To evaluate this approach, a user testing is conducted. Results show a high willingness to act as secret holders, reliable participation in share release, and high security confidence in the proposed system. The findings demonstrate that voters can collectively maintain secrecy and that such a practical deployment is feasible.

Problem

• Achieving ballot secrecy in decentralized large-scale elections
• Balancing strong confidentiality with real-world voting applicability
• Enabling voter participation as secret holders through blockchain

Innovation

• Combines threshold cryptography with smart contracts
• Uses intuitive interface to hide blockchain complexity
• Enables voters to collectively secure ballot secrecy