IADIS International Journal on Computer Science and Information Systems Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 148-165 ISSN: 1646-3692 148 THE FUTURE OF E-VOTING Pavel Tarasov and Hitesh Tewari School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, Ireland ABSTRACT Voting systems have been around for hundreds of years and despite different views on their integrity, have always been deemed secure with some fundamental security and anonymity principles. Numerous electronic systems have been proposed and implemented but some suspicion has been raised regarding the integrity of elections due to detected security vulnerabilities within these systems. Electronic voting, to be successful, requires a more transparent and secure approach, than is offered by current protocols. The approach presented in this paper involves a protocol developed on blockchain technology. The underlying technology used in the voting system is a payment scheme, which offers anonymity of transactions, a trait not seen in blockchain protocols to date. The proposed protocol offers anonymity of voter transactions, while keeping the transactions private, and the election transparent and secure. The underlying payment protocol has not been modified in any way, the voting protocol merely offers an alternative use case. KEYWORDS Blockchain, E-Voting, Zcash, zk-SNARK 1. INTRODUCTION With blockchain technology steadily striving towards becoming the new system for decentralized payment schemes, amongst other implementations, it is easy to imagine why this technology can be considered an ethical liberator with regards to different application domains. Blockchain, although a relatively new concept, has gained enough popularity for applications to emerge, such as simplified methods for identification and authentication, the widely known decentralized payment scheme, Bitcoin, and domain systems which reside outside the control of the government or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and many more (Swan, 2015). The number of blockchain systems is steadily increasing, however the electronic voting domain is very slow to adapt to changes in technology with a relatively low number of systems devised so far, which introduce a fresh look on the electronic voting scene, based on our observation of the state of the art.