Votera

An electronic voting platform that utilizes the ethereum blockchain in storing and retrieving the election data

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NAIJAHACKS HACKATHON 2018

Team name - CreativeTeckies

Team members

Category MediaTech

Problem The Opacity, Lack of Privacy, Integrity and Easy Accessibility of Traditional Electoral Systems

Proposed Solution A secure, transparent and tamper-proof voting platform that is end-to-end verifiable using blockchain technology.

Proposed Stack Solidity, Web3 js, Truffle js, Node js, MongoDB

Votera - The platform in details

Problem Description

The Lack of transparency in our elections and the lack of security in our electoral systems/platforms has always been a great issue. Users votes can be manipulated easily and wrong candidates get elected to take positions they never merited.

Why

Our goal is to build a secure, transparent and tamper-proof online voting platform that will allow for greater election credibility

Way Forward

Solving this problem will involve using technologies whereby we will be able to gain transparency into an election, without compromising voter's privacy, and have a way to mathematically prove that the elections results are accurate.  Also, at the voter’s request, there would even be a way to allow a voter to cast their vote online in an election and follow their vote into the 'ballot box' to ensure that their vote was safely and securely stored without being changed or altered in any way.

How are we Solving this problem?

With the use of the Ethereum Blockchain !!!.

Blockchain technology already secures billions of dollars around the world.  We believe it should secure our votes as well.  Using the unparalleled security of blockchain technology, we are poised to disrupt the established voting process in this Country by offering a more cost-effective and technologically superior solution.  

** We created a smart contract using solidity, the smart contract is responsible for creating, storing and retrieving the election data from and to the ethereum blockchain.

** We made use of Truffle in testing and deploying the smart contract.

** We also made use of web3.js in interacting with the smart contract on the frontend, nodejs was made use of for the backend and angularjs for complex ui manipulations.

Why Votera(Our proposed Solution)

** Votera eliminates the need for a centralized authority in electoral processes.

** Secure – With the Secure, distributed, decentralized peer-to-peer network and transparent database provided by the Blockchain technology, votera can be used for enabling of smart governments and bringing about more credibility.

** Transparency and Credibility - There is a strong believe that blockchain based voting systems are able to deliver to the society a trustworthy voting mechanism capable of increasing transparency in an election’s process, and in consequence enhancing voter confidence. The blockchain could be used for gathering, in a transparent and publicly verifiable way, citizens’ votes. Every vote therefore benefits from the characteristics of a Blockchain transaction, namely: It is non-modifiable; It is non-dismissible; It cannot be registered in multiple ways; All nodes possess a valid copy.

** Availablility - Votes could be casted on any device from any location still maintaining the guarantees of anonymity, uniqueness and unchangeability. Votera makes the electoral platform readily available throughout the whole duration of the election.

** Convenience - Votera effectively eliminates the need for long queues with no assurance of being able to cast a vote at the end of the day. With votera, you can vote from anywhere. Your ballot stays a secret, and you can know for certain that your vote counted. You can interact with your government and elections like never before. Register from your phone, create petitions from your phone, vote from your phone.

** Cost-effective – The Nigerian Presidential conducted in 2015 was said to have cost approximately N108, 000, 000, 000 ($300,000,000) and is estimated to cost N242, 000, 000, 000 ($670, 000, 000) in 2019, a 55% increase. Votera can dramatically reduce the cost of conducting elections.

** How is Votera Cost Effective - Every contract on the ethereum blockchain requires a certain amount of network/miners fee (often called gas) to be mined and stored on the ethereum blockchain. Election contracts created using votera are well optimized so that each voting transactions costs ~ $0.03 to be mined. Now $0.03 for a population of 180,000,000 is approximately $5,400,000 which is ~ N1,890,000,000

** Ledger ability - It also has the potential of becoming the system of record keeping for all political transactions, ranging from political manifestoes, assets declaration, profile of all political seat holders, national assets and budgets.

** Documents Verification/Validation – It can also be adopted for the verification and validation of the authenticity of finance and political documents such as election manifestoes, budgets, assets, bills and so on.

Challenges Faced During the Hackathon

** One of the major problem we faced was creating the smart contract, testing and interacting with it in the frontend as we were a bit new to it, ** We had only a single blockchain dapp developer and work was a bit slow cause of this. We also faced issues with deploying to the main ethereum network as this required lot of testing and optimizations

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