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

TL;DR

The paper addresses ballot secrecy in blockchain voting by introducing collectively secure voting, where voters may opt in as secret holders who hold partial decryption shares and unlock ballots when a threshold $t$ of $n$ holders cooperate. It integrates timed-release encryption and smart contracts to provide verifiable, end-to-end security while maintaining a user-friendly voter experience through client-side cryptography and zero blockchain interaction. Key contributions include a practical, open-source system design, a real-world deployment with a data-driven user study, and a utility model predicting secret-holder participation, suggesting incentive structures to sustain security. The work demonstrates feasibility for large-scale elections and shows that voters are willing to participate in securing ballots, potentially increasing trust and legitimacy of blockchain-based voting in practical settings.

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.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Overview of collectively secure voting
• Figure 2: Decision of secret holder registration in user testing (left) and voting result on the number of extra raffle tokens for successful secret holders (right)
• Figure 3: Participants’ willingness to act as secret holders for voting topics with different characteristics on the scale of 0 (very unlikely) to 1 (very likely)
• Figure 4: Factor importance of the secret holder opt-in decision
• Figure 5: Website user interface for registration