Impact of Decentralization on Electronic Voting Systems: A Systematic Literature Survey

Abstract

The modernization of voting methods is a dynamic area of research currently. In the past, innovation in voting methods was limited to the automation of steps in the process through mechanical means. This changed with the introduction of commercial cryptography in the 1970s, whose applications to voting triggered a new era in this research field. Researchers used the following years to apply tools derived from cryptographic methods to build increasingly secure, transparent, and practical electronic voting systems. Despite the effort, a true remote electronic voting system was never achieved with the technology available. The introduction of Bitcoin in 2009 brought much attention to the blockchain concept that supported it. This new data model offered new levels of transparency, data immutability, and pseudo-anonymity that made it attractive and useful to e-voting researchers. Soon after, articles detailing the first blockchain-based e-voting systems were published, and the research field entered a new era. This article presents a study on the evolution of research in electronic voting systems, following a systematic literature review methodology and a chronological evolution from the first systems that employed public cryptographic concepts up to blockchain-based proposals, with the objective of detailing the evolution of the technology as a whole, as well as all the elements, centralised and decentralised, created and used to implement voting systems.