IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/fntmic/0700000071.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Voting Over a Distributed Ledger: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Author

Listed:
  • Amrita Dhillon
  • Grammateia Kotsialou
  • Peter McBurney
  • Luke Riley

Abstract

This work discusses the potential of a blockchain based infrastructure for a decentralised online voting platform. When compared to monograph based voting, online voting can vastly increase the speed that votes can be counted, expand the overall accessibility of the election system and decrease the cost of turnout. Yet despite these advantages, online voting for political office is subject to fraud at various levels due to its centralised nature. In this monograph, we describe a general architecture of a centralised online voting system and detail which areas of such a system are vulnerable to electoral fraud. We then proceed to introduce the key ideas underlying blockchain technology as a decentralised mechanism that can address these problems. We discuss the advantages and weaknesses of the blockchain technology, the protocols the technology uses and what criteria a good blockchain protocol should satisfy (depending on the voting application). We argue that the decentralisation inherent in the blockchain technology could increase the public’s trust in national elections, as well as eliminate voter impersonation and double voting. We conclude with a discussion regarding how economists and social scientists can collaborate with the blockchain community in a research agenda on the design of efficient blockchain protocols and new voting systems such as liquid democracy.

Suggested Citation

  • Amrita Dhillon & Grammateia Kotsialou & Peter McBurney & Luke Riley, 2021. "Voting Over a Distributed Ledger: An Interdisciplinary Perspective," Foundations and Trends(R) in Microeconomics, now publishers, vol. 12(3), pages 200-268, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:now:fntmic:0700000071
    DOI: 10.1561/0700000071
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/0700000071
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1561/0700000071?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nicolaus Tideman, 1995. "The Single Transferable Vote," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(1), pages 27-38, Winter.
    2. Yusuf Neggers, 2018. "Enfranchising Your Own? Experimental Evidence on Bureaucrat Diversity and Election Bias in India," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(6), pages 1288-1321, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dhillon, Amrita & Kotsialou, Grammateia & Xefteris, Dimitris, 2021. "Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes," SocArXiv ubk7p, Center for Open Science.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. repec:osf:socarx:34df5_v1 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Dhillon, Amrita & Kotsialou, Grammateia & McBurney, Peter & Riley, Luke, 2019. "Voting over a distributed ledger: An interdisciplinary perspective," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 416, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    3. Murat R. Sertel & M. Remzi Sanver, 2004. "Strong equilibrium outcomes of voting games ¶are the generalized Condorcet winners," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 22(2), pages 331-347, April.
    4. Druckman, James N. & Levy, Jeremy & Sands, Natalie, 2021. "Bias in education disability accommodations," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    5. Haris Aziz & Markus Brill & Vincent Conitzer & Edith Elkind & Rupert Freeman & Toby Walsh, 2017. "Justified representation in approval-based committee voting," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 48(2), pages 461-485, February.
    6. Steven J. Brams & Markus Brill & Anne-Marie George, 2022. "The excess method: a multiwinner approval voting procedure to allocate wasted votes," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 58(2), pages 283-300, February.
    7. Diss, Mostapha & Mahajne, Muhammad, 2020. "Social acceptability of Condorcet committees," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 14-27.
    8. Eivind Stensholt, 2010. "Voces populi and the art of listening," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 35(2), pages 291-317, July.
    9. Brennan, Geoffrey & Hamlin, Alan, 1998. "Expressive Voting and Electoral Equilibrium," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 95(1-2), pages 149-175, April.
    10. Martin J. Osborne & Rabee Tourky, 2008. "Party Formation in Single-Issue Politics," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(5), pages 974-1005, September.
    11. Stensholt, Eivind, 2020. "Anomalies of Instant Runoff Voting," Discussion Papers 2020/6, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Business and Management Science.
    12. Aleksei Y. Kondratev & Alexander S. Nesterov, 2020. "Measuring majority power and veto power of voting rules," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 183(1), pages 187-210, April.
    13. Salvatore Barbaro, 2021. "A social-choice perspective on authoritarianism and political polarization," Working Papers 2108, Gutenberg School of Management and Economics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.
    14. James Green-Armytage, 2015. "Direct voting and proxy voting," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 26(2), pages 190-220, June.
    15. Sarwate Anand D. & Checkoway Stephen & Shacham Hovav, 2013. "Risk-limiting Audits and the Margin of Victory in Nonplurality Elections," Statistics, Politics and Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 29-64, January.
    16. Moreira, Diana B. & Perez, Santiago, 2022. "Who Benefits from Meritocracy?," IZA Discussion Papers 15341, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    17. James Green-Armytage & T. Nicolaus Tideman, 2020. "Selecting the runoff pair," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 182(1), pages 119-137, January.
    18. Yonghong An & Pengfei Liu, 2020. "Eliciting Information from Sensitive Survey Questions," Papers 2009.01430, arXiv.org.
    19. Nicolaus Tideman & Daniel Richardson, 2000. "Better Voting Methods Through Technology: The Refinement-Manageability Trade-Off in the Single Transferable Vote," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 103(1), pages 13-34, April.
    20. Jung Sakong, 2021. "Identifying Taste-Based Discrimination: Effect of Black Electoral Victories on Racial Prejudice and Economic Gaps," Working Paper Series WP-2021-07, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    21. J. Andrew Harris & Catherine Kamindo & Peter van der Windt, 2020. "Electoral Administration in Fledgling Democracies:Experimental Evidence from Kenya," Working Papers 20200036, New York University Abu Dhabi, Department of Social Science, revised Jan 2020.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:now:fntmic:0700000071. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucy Wiseman (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nowpublishers.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.