The impact of blockchain technology on the trustworthiness of online voting systems - an exploration of blockchain technology

Abstract

Online Voting evidently increases election turnouts. However, recent state-owned initiatives have failed due to security concerns and a lack of trust in the systems. Blockchain seems to be a very suitable technical solution to establish transparency in online voting and thus, create trust. We have built our own, blockchain-enabled voting platform and utilized it to run an A/B-testing experiment at an university election to investigate its effect. Our results show that students trusted the blockchain-based voting version less than the control version. How ever, literature and our focus group findings revealed thatthere is an interrelation between the distrust among the students anda low level of familiarity with blockchain technology. Hence, we conclude tha tpeople should be educated before being confronted with blockchain-enabled online voting to take advantage of the technology’s potential.