Voting_App

link to website: https://youssefabdelwahab.github.io/Voting_App/

members: Youssef, Rena, Carla, Ayca, Melanie.

Revolutionizing Voting using Blockchain

Motivation

Our motivation for creating a voting contract was to address some of the challenges in the voting process, such as:

• Election corruption
• Ballot fraud
• Access to voting
• Election integrity
• Cost (time, money, resources)

How blockchain can help

• Secure & Immutable
  • No one can change the executed contract
  • No one can tamper with the casted vote
• Public ledger & Distributed control
  • The blockchain network is secure, transparent and anonymous
  • Every voter has the ability to view their casted vote
  • One central party does not hold control of the network
• Added benefits : Cost & time effective, increased sustainability
  • Automated vote counts reduces the need for manual ballot counting
  • The 2019 General Canadian election cost approximately $502M

Cost and Savings

• Costs:
  • Maintaining offices,
  • Organizing elections,
  • Registration & Postage,
  • Printing ballots,
  • Voting machines,
  • Lost productivity
  • Cost of fraud
• Savings:
  • No printing, online PR
  • Check vote is counted
  • No Voting machines

Other Use Cases

• Shareholder voting
• Professional Associations
• Consensus requirements
• Delegation and Proxy voting
• Hot or Not? 😉

Smart Contract Challenges

• Still early technology
• Hacking vulnerabilities
• Identity management
  • Without physical ID identity verification is difficult
• Coercion
  • Voter interference
  • Bribery
  • Voter Selling
• Requires an additional interface for smooth voter usability

What we built

• A smart contract that enables a secure voting system with the following functions:

  • Candidate names are hard-coded into the smart contract
  • A central body (i.e. government) can mint voting tokens
  • Voting tokens are transferred to registered and verified voters only
  • Registered voters must be 18 years of age or older
  • The contract will ensure only one vote is cast per voter
  • Votes are counted
  • Close vote button to end
  • Display the winning candidate

• Overlayed the smart contract with a user interface to enable online voting via a website address

Exploration & Challenges

• We started with a simple voting contract using docs.solidity.lang.org
• We layered on various functions to achieve the voting system
• Several errors related to:
  • Function inputs - age requirement, minting tokens, formatting of voting button inputs
  • User friendly format - we were initially are unable to use bytes32 format for First Name, Last Name inputs. We needed to put everything in “” for the contract to work.
• Proper instructions needed for full functionality (i.e. how to connect to Metamask or other digital wallet)
• Experimented with Remix feature - One Click Dapp which we found had minimal functionality

Post Mortem

• Determine a way to authenticate voters upon registration and allow for photo identification/address verification (Two Factor Authentication)
• Better understand how tokens are allocated to registered voters securely
• Voting instructions difficult to follow (i.e. connect Metamask, buy voting token, cast vote, etc.)
• User experience is not intuitive; today most applications are for financial use cases (wallets, currency, coins)
• Deploy a contract that allows the class to engage with the contract and participate in a “real” vote