Paper 2021/047

Evolution of Bulletin Board & its application to E-Voting – A Survey

Misni Harjo Suwito, Yoshifumi Ueshige, and Kouichi Sakurai

Abstract

The voting process is fundamental to any democratic system – be it a country or a company's boardroom. Nearly forty years ago, e-voting was theoretically perceived as a more efficient replacement of the widely existing paper-based traditional voting system. Several research works have been carried out to ensure more security and efficiency in different settings for e-voting schemes. One of the fundamental building blocks of e-voting systems is the public Bulletin Board through which several security properties are achieved. After introducing Blockchain technology, the bulletin board has found a new meaningful and concrete way of distributed way of implementation. Before Blockchain technology, either such a system was theoretically assumed or perceived as a public broadcast channel with memory. In this survey, we present a concise survey of bulletin boards' evolution with a typical application to the e-voting systems. We note that bulletin boards have other applications in other joint computation areas. Still, we are interested in evolving e-voting systems based on bulletin board and how several desired security properties are realized through bulletin boards.