Scalable Elections and Electronic Voting based on Blockchains

One goal of this thesis is to propose a scalable decentralized e-voting system based on smart contracts, with maximum voter privacy, fault tolerance, and coercion resistance. The first challenge is to optimize costs for running expensive zero-knowledge proof verification at smart contracts by off-chain constructs. The second challenge is the scalability w.r.t. to the number of participants and vote choices, which depends on the convenient type of the blockchain and its consensus mechanism, such as semi-permissionless blockchains (PoS) and permissioned blockchains (PoA). Another topic of this direction is partial tally-hiding protocols and their application in the context of public blockchains. The last topic is the eligibility of participants and its public verifiability/guarantees.