SPECIFICATION

Technical Field

The present disclosure relates to vote tallying systems and methods. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to systems and methods for preventing and detecting voting fraud using blockchain technology.

Background

Ensuring citizen confidence in the reliability of elections is vital to functioning democracies. If citizens lose confidence in the validity of their elections, trust in society diminishes, governments lose consent of the governed, and societies fall into disarray and even war. Regardless of whether voter fraud is real or imagined, the mere appearance of conceivable voter fraud may be sufficient to erode citizens' trust in the democratic process.

However, modern democracies also demand anonymity in voting. Anonymity allows citizens to vote for unpopular candidates without fear of retribution, allowing freer debate and the possibility of outside candidates winning elections. Additionally, anonymity protects against the dangers of mobs by denying dangerous people access to voting histories who may harm people who did not vote in accordance with their preferred candidate. Anonymity reduces the prospect of voter intimidation, allowing minority and underrepresented groups to vote freely, and accumulate sufficient votes to represent their interests.

The desires for vote security and anonymity are in tension, though. On the one hand, possible avenues of voter fraud, such as stuffing ballot boxes, tampering with reported vote tallies, or deliberate miscounting can all be eliminated with a public record of voters and their respective choices. On the other hand, anonymous voting prevents the identification of fraudulent ballots which are impossible to separate from legitimate ballots. An intruder or fraudulent person attempting to sway an election by submitting fraudulent ballots benefits from the same anonymity that keeps citizens safe and free.

Accordingly, systems and methods are desired which ensure anonymity of legitimate voters while also providing a public and verifiable vote record, thereby increasing confidence and participation in elections.

BRIEF SUMMARY

In an embodiment of the present disclosure, a voting system comprises: at least one voting machine comprising: at least one voting machine processor; and at least one non-transitory voting machine storage medium comprising instructions that, when executed by the at least one voting machine processor, cause the at least one voting machine processor to perform voting machine operations comprising: initializing a vote blockchain with a vote blockchain genesis block, the vote blockchain genesis block comprising a voting machine identifier and a voting machine identifier hash value; storing the vote blockchain in at least one voting machine memory; iteratively, for a plurality of voters: receiving a signal indicating at least one vote made by a voter; creating a data structure comprising the at least one vote and a hash value of a preceding block; determining a new block hash value of the data structure; appending a new block comprising the data structure and the new block hash value to the vote blockchain; and storing the vote blockchain in the at least one memory.

In another embodiment of the present disclosure, a computerized method of vote tallying comprises initializing a vote blockchain with a vote blockchain genesis block, the vote blockchain genesis block comprising a voting machine identifier and a voting machine identifier hash value; storing the vote blockchain in at least one voting machine memory; iteratively, for a plurality of voters: receiving a signal indicating at least one vote made by a voter; creating a data structure comprising the at least one vote and a hash value of a preceding block; calculating a hash difficulty based on a vote trend and a voter check-in rate, the vote trend representing a percentage of votes for a candidate of a plurality of candidates out of a number of preceding votes, the voter check-in rate representing a number of voters arriving during a time period, wherein the hash difficulty represents a number of characters of a hash value that match a predetermined sequence determining a new block hash value of the data structure, the new block hash value beginning with the number of characters of the predetermined sequence determined by the hash difficulty; appending a new block comprising the data structure and the new block hash value to the vote blockchain; printing a receipt with the new block has value; and printing the new block hash value on a paper ballot scanned to provide the received signal.

