Blockchain Based Voting Systems Yash Soni 1 , Leandros Maglaras 1 , Mohamed Amine Ferrag 1 De Montfort University, School of Computer Science and Informatics, Leicester, UK 1 Guelma University, Department of Computer Science, Guelma, Algeria p17237732@alumni365.dmu.ac.uk leandros.maglaras@dmu.ac.uk Mohamed.amine.ferrag@gmail.com Abstract: Voting is an essential tool for any democratic government. It is the most important factor that makes the government for the people, by the people. It is surprising that many countries in the world haven’t moved on from traditional paper ballot system of voting. There are some countries that have taken a forward step by using Electronic voting ma- chines. As simple as it may sound, there are a lot of issues with these systems. Between having to physically go to the venues and standing in long queue at the polling station to counting the vote by hand the entire process is time consuming at the same time expensive. Malicious actors have many avenues to influence paper ballot based elections using intimidation at the polling booth by capturing the ballot box or stuffing the box by fake votes. Similarly, in Electronic voting machines, a highly motivated group can get hold of the machine and change the chip so whichever button is pressed, all the votes go to one political party. Another issue is it whether it is impossible to keep track of the votes. How can we be sure that our vote was counted or perhaps in case of ballot paper, not thrown away? The present article discusses ways of bringing voting systems into the 21st century by using the Blockchain Technology. Keywords: Cyber Security; System on Chip; Microcontroller Security; Hardware Security. 1. Introduction Today the world around us is rapidly changing. Artificial Intelligence have been making huge waves in today’s industries. It has forced people to realign their priority. At the core of all of this buzz, there is data on which all the sophisticated algorithms train on. Since the advancement in AI, Data has become the new oil. Companies that consume public data like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or e-commerce sites like Amazon, Flipkart and Alibaba control enough of market capital to influence the outcome of any event or perhaps shape people’s’ opinion. There are several cases where the data centers of these social media giants were breached and profile details of the millions of users were leaked Maglaras et al. (2018). Voting systems around the world have come under scrutiny where there are several cases of fraud reported. Because of this people tend to lose faith in Electoral Process. Violence, corruption, riots are of- ten things that go hand in hand during Election process. Due to this, there is a social imbalance amongst society. For decades we have been elected our leader by participating in the democratic festival of voting. Each country has their own way of electing member of their parliament. Elections are held after gap of every 4 or 5 years. In countries like United States, Germany, Spain, Japan and Israel elections are held every four years while in some democracies like United Kingdom, India, South Korea, Canada and Ireland there is a five-year term for the elected leaders. Various voting methods are deployed around the world. Some of the most common systems are, – First Past the Post System – Instant Run-off Method – Two Round Run-off – Proportional Representation Every system has certain advantages and disadvantages attached to it. We will discuss all the systems in depth and try to figure out which system should be preferred for a blockchain based Voting system Hj´almarsson et al. (2018). We will discuss all the systems in depth and try to figure out which system should be preferred for our blockchain based Voting system. Before we dwell into these systems let’s assume that there was an election in our local constituency and after counting the votes, our four candidates,