Investigating the Security of End-to-End and Blockchain-based Electronic Voting Systems : A Comparative Literature Review

Abstract: Digitalization has led to the development of electronic voting systems, which in turn influences electoral integrity. Since the fairness of elections plays such an important part for democracy, the security aspects that keep an election's integrity and fairness are of great importance and thus, is the objective of this research. The research question this study aims to answer is “What security differences and / or similarities can be identified between End-to-End and blockchain-based voting systems?”. A comparative systematic literature review was done in order to answer the research question, which started by finding relevant literature needed for the analysis. After identifying the necessary articles, advantages and disadvantages for End-to-End and blockchain-based voting systems were outlined and then compared in a truth table (table 5). The results showed that the two systems share similar characteristics such as: verifiability, voter anonymity / ballot secrecy, integrity and the lack of scalability. Whereas the main differences are found in relation to how susceptible each system is to attacks. This leads to the conclusion that the biggest difference identified between blockchain-based and End-to-End systems is their susceptibility to attacks.