A systematic literature review of blockchain-based E-Voting

Document Type : Review Article

Authors

Department of Computer Engineering, Islamic Azad University, Sanandaj Branch, Sanandaj, Iran.

Abstract

This paper aims to identify, analyze, and organize the literature on the applications of blockchain technology in electronic/online voting, as well as provide insights for future research. This study tries to show the most important applications of blockchain in e-voting and identify the most important e-voting challenges that blockchain offers a solution to them. This study follows the method of Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to analyze the existing literature on blockchain integration with e-voting. In this study, 30 articles from conferences and journals between 2017 and May 2021 were reviewed. It seems that the integration of blockchain with e-voting is in the early stages of its operation and researchers and experts are not fully aware of the potential of blockchain for e-voting. The most important results of merging or using blockchain for e-voting are voter privacy protection, anonymity, security increase, and voting system reliability. But on the other hand, there are serious discrepancies among researchers in terms of the cost-efficiency and scalability of blockchain-based voting systems. The limitations of this study are mainly due to the scarcity of studies on the applications of blockchain for e-voting (large-scale) in journals and conferences, as well as information on private-university projects that are implementing their idea is not available.

Keywords


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