Trusted and Transparent Voting Systems

该项目旨在探索分布式账本技术（DLT）在涉及投票和集体决策的领域中的应用。有许多领域需要某种形式的投票，例如对提案进行投票或在慈善机构，专业组织，俱乐部，工会，政党和私人公司进行选举。重要的是，即使各方互不信任，也要确保投票结果被各方接受。目前的选举系统需要受信任的个人或第三方组织来进行投票，这依赖于他们的诚实以及他们保护选举免受任何形式恶意攻击的能力。事实上，许多这样的选举仍然使用纸质选票，这仍然是一个真实的关注的组织，尽管方便，成本和效率，电子选举可能带来的优势。鉴于围绕电子投票管理的相关安全问题，考虑使用DLT平台为此类系统记录和汇总投票提供可靠的基础是很自然的，因为它们可以提供透明度和商定的防篡改选举记录。该项目将研究如何在保持必要的安全级别的同时实现这一目标，特别是这如何受到任何特定分布式账本技术选择的底层设计的影响。将DLT引入投票领域也为投票方案带来了新的可能性。世界各地的政治制度已经发展出复杂的选举制度，例如单一可转移选票，其结果计算起来既繁琐又耗时，但其结果被认为更能反映选民的意愿，因此值得这方面的努力。然而，对于使用纸质选票进行的非政治选举，这种努力通常是禁止的。政治学中的社会选择理论考虑了不同的投票系统如何影响选择的方式，电子支持这种系统的能力使其计票机制更复杂但可能会产生更接近选民集体选择的结果的计划成为可能。因此，该项目还将调查通过投票方案的变化对组织及其治理和决策过程的潜在影响。DLT还支持个人持有的更复杂投票权的管理。在许多私人公司的应用程序中，特定的股权拥有特定的权利和特权。例如，公司的原始股东可能对后来的股东出售销售股份拥有优先购买权，或者在公司破产时拥有优先获得赔偿的权利。目前，对于私人控股公司，持股及其相关权利通常记录在书面合同中，相关信息仅保存在电子表格中。至少在原则上，DLT可以很容易地支持这种情况下的投票，特定股东的特定权利被编码在商定的智能合约中-即，自动化（自我执行）的性能脚本，也位于分布式账本上。该项目的一部分将旨在探索这些想法的实用性。虽然该项目在现阶段不是调查政治或法定选举，但该项目的一部分将考虑该技术的长期路线图。除了考虑通过新的治理和决策可能性对组织的长期影响外，还将考虑DLT如何在政治选举电子投票系统的新兴设计中发挥作用。

This project aims to explore applications of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in domains involving voting and collective decision making. There are many domains in which some form of balloting is required, such as voting on proposals or electing in charities, professional organisations, clubs, trades unions, political parties, and private companies. It is important to run such ballots in a way that the result is accepted by all parties even where they do not trust each other.Current election systems require trusted individuals or third party organisations to run the ballot, which places reliance on their honesty and also on their ability to secure the election against any form of malicious attack. The fact that many such elections are still run using paper ballots demonstrates that this remains a real concern for organisations despite the advantages of convenience, cost and efficiency that electronic elections may bring. Given the associated security issues around the management of electronic votes, it is natural to consider the use of DLT platforms to provide a trustworthy basis for such systems in recording and aggregating votes, since they can provide transparency and an agreed tamper-proof record of the election. The project will investigate how this can be achieved while maintaining the necessary levels of security, and in particular how this is impacted by the underlying design of any particular choice of distributed ledger technology.The introduction of DLT into the voting domain also enables new possibilities for voting schemes. Political systems around the world have evolved complex election systems, for example single transferrable vote, where the results are cumbersome and time-consuming to calculate, but where the result is considered to better reflect the will of the electorate and hence worthy of this effort. However for non-political elections run with paper ballots this effort is generally prohibitive. Social choice theory within Political Science considers how different voting systems can affect how choices are made, and the ability to support such systems electronically enables the viability of schemes whose tallying mechanisms are more complex but which may give results which match more closely the collective choice of the voters. Hence the project will also investigate the potential impact on organisations and their governance and decision making processes through the variation of voting schemes.DLT also supports the management of more complex voting rights held by individuals. In many private company applications, particular shareholdings have specific rights and privileges. For example, the originating shareholders of a company may have pre-emption rights over the sale of shares by later shareholders, or priority rights to compensation in the event of a bankruptcy of the company. At present, for privately-held companies, shareholdings and the rights associated to them are generally recorded in written contracts and the relevant information held only in spreadsheets. At least in principle, DLTs could readily support voting in such contexts, with the specific rights accruing to particular shareholders being encoded in agreed smart contracts - i.e., automated (self-executing) performance scripts that also sit on the distributed ledger. A strand of this project will aim to explore the practicality of such ideas.Although the project is not investigating political or statutary elections at this stage, a strand of the project will consider the longer term roadmap for the technology. As well as considering the longer term impact on organisations through new governance and decision making possibilities, this will include consideration of how DLT may play a part in emerging designs for electronic voting systems for political elections.