Image header : Project title : Stellot Summary : Privacy-first i-Voting platform powered by Stellar. Category : Applications Goals : Inherit open blockchain trust in the i-voting system. Lower operational costs by leveraging existing blockchain infrastructure. Achieve privacy and verifiability for all voters. Timeline : Q4.2019 - Start blockchain-based i-voting systems research. ✓ Q1.2020 - Create a journal article draft. ✓ Q1.2020 - Create a proof-of-concept application. ✓ Q1.2020 - Create a proof-of-concept service for creating general-purpose votings. ✓ Q2.2020 - Add keybase auth via jwt and keybase-bot (similar how https://stellarcommunity.fund works) ✓ Q2.2020 - Add basic authN & authZ methods (cookie, IP address, codes, email, domain etc.) ✓ Q2.2020 - Add vote encryption (preventing partial results before the end of voting). ✓ Q2.2020 - Add multi-select voting. Q3.2020 - Store voting meta-data on IPFS content-addressable network. ✓ Q3.2020 - Solve the scalability problems ✓ Q3.2020 - Add stake-weighted votings. Q3.2020 - Finish service for creating general-purpose votings. Q3.2020 - Publish a journal article. Q3.2020 - Add domain-specific auth with OpenID Connect. Q4.2020 - Add metamask support for stake-weighted votings. Q4.2020 - Create a framework for creating domain-specific standalone votings. Q4.2020 - Find academic/government votings where such a system could be used. Q1.2021 - Host dean elections of the Gdańsk University of Technology with Stellot. Description : Stellot is a privacy-first i-voting system powered by the Stellar network. We argue that the proposed system satisfies all requirements stated for robust i-voting systems such as transparency, verifiability, and voter anonymity/privacy. The system is designed in such a way, that voter is completely abstracted from blockchain technology used underneath. Open Stellar blockchain allows everyone to verify the election results without having to trust a central authority. I believe that this project is valuable for Stellar, mainly because it proves that Stellar can be used not only for asset tokenization and payments but also as a robust i-voting system backbone. Starting with the general-purpose voting platform, we would like to target all kinds of votings including domain-specific elections, straw polls, referendums, plebiscites. It would be amazing to host the next SCF voting with Stellot, proving its self-contained ecosystem. Since we have connections with our University, we will start here with annual elections every February. When applied successfully, we will scale the product to other domains, bringing Stellar high notability. The voter privacy is achieved by the blind-signature technique on the stellar transaction, while the signer is protected by a cut-and-choose method. Deeper technical details are available in this draft of the article (should be finished in about month or two). We provide demo implementation for the proposed system under https://voting.stasbar.com . This general-purpose voting service is great for end-users votings, but we believe that our goal is also to digitize the academic/government votings. Such elections require domain-specific applications, and so we would like to create a framework for these types of solutions. Especially the Auth-Server is something that will differ in every institution. Links : Article: https://github.com/stasbar/stellar-voting/releases/download/0.0.1/draft_evoting_on_stellar.pdf Repository: https://github.com/stasbar/stellar-voting Demo: https://stellot.com/ Tags: voting, i-voting, privacy, platform PS. I would like to thank @dzham for his help with blind-signature over ed25519 scheme, without him, the project would still be in the design phase.

I reviewed your app How can you prove that it is decentralized? And how is this app different from centralized apps? Why can someone vote infinitely? I think you have to change your structure and use the public key to validate the voters and every user has to sign their own vote. This will make your system more reliable.

John How can you prove that it is decentralized? I'm not sure how to interpret your question, so I will describe how it works in the big picture. Let's take a Stellar Community Funding voting as an example. Galactictalk or Keybase would become Authentication Server(AS) so you can "Login with GalacticTalk/Keybase" account. CENTRALIZED The Stellar organization would run the Token Distribution Server (TDS), which will be responsible for both: signing transactions, and authorization (keeping track of who has already voted, and who is eligible for issuing ballot). CENTRALIZED. Client Webapp is just a user interface that is responsible to interact with AS, TDS, and Stellar Horizon API. DECENTRALIZED Stellar Horizon API is considered DECENTRALIZED since it is just API to stellar network, it can be hosted by anyone. Stellar Network is DECENTRALIZED. So yes, the government layer is centralized. I addressed this issue in section 8 Fully Decentralized Blockchain Application . But it's important to realize how limited the power of government is in this system. Since he (the government) manages the authorization, he can block a certain users from casting vote. But he can not perform votes on other user behalf since there is only the limited publicly known number of created tokens (e.g. the number of galactictalk active users). Yes, he can assume that only 20% of users will take part in the election, and use the 80% of unspent tokens to perform vote on his behalf. But it still could be mitigated by limiting the number of tokens to the number of users who are incentivized to cast a vote, so the frequency would be high, therefore limiting the number of unspent tokens. Decentralized auth is a completely different topic, but It is something I would love to continue my research on. Zero-knowledge proofs might be the clue. And how is this app different from centralized apps? Besides auth, everything is recorded on the blockchain. Each user can count the voting results on its behalf, without the trust to government. The user is responsible for publishing the vote transaction to the stellar voting, so he can be sure that his vote was taken into account. But the biggest advantage is the fact that the votes are completely anonymous since no one (besides the voter) knows who cast the particular transaction to the network. But everyone can be sure that this transaction was authorized by TDS (because he blindly signed the transaction). Why can someone vote infinitely? Right now the authorization is skipped. I assumed that it's an implementation detail, that I'm currently working on. 04.2020 - Add basic authN & authZ methods (cookie, IP address, one-time link, one-time code, email, etc.). It's just a matter of time, not lack of concept. I think you have to change your structure and use the public key to validate the voters and every user has to sign their own vote. It would require the user to already posses the Stellar account which is highly unpractical and limiting. I can't imagine a scenario, other than stellar community voting, where you would require each voter to possess the Stellar account. Additionally, it would allow connecting the user with his vote. Right now the user does not even know that he is using blockchain, which is one of the most important features of this system. I hope it answers your questions, let me know if there is something more I could clarify. I receive many questions, so I assume that a lot of things are unclear, I will create a FAQ page and some illustrations 🙂

Does people can vote using proof of stake like on Binance with BNB? What is the business model to monetize the project ?

stasbar Thanks for the description but what is the most important feature in the voting platform? The answer is simple, the poll result must be valid. why we use blockchain in the voting platform? because we want to show that the poll result is valid and no one can change it. So what happens if you don't use the public key for a validating vote and don't use the private key for signing that? The answer is simple, votes are invalid because no voter signed them and you can't prove that. One example: Imagine that we would use your voting system for this Grant Stellar period And everyone can vote indefinitely Can we trust the poll results? I refer you to look at the Status voting system, this is a perfect sample of a voting system

stasbar Also the image you posted is a simple structure of all Stellar apps And it doesn't show the structure of a decentralized voting platform.

Justin Does people can vote using proof of stake like on Binance with BNB? This solution is built with non-crypto users in mind. I argue that this is the only way to use this solution on large scale. Proof-of-stake voting or I would rather say stake-weighted voting, would be very interesting in crypto space. If we take the basic weighting model, i.e. based just on amount of XLM on your account, then the implementation is really straightforward. Instead of the vote token go directly from distribution account to ballotBox account, it would go first from distributing account to the user account, and then from the user account to ballotBox account. This way, counting results would involve one additional step, checking the account balance at the end of elections. I will add it to the timeline. What is the business model to monetize the project ? For general-purpose votings, the idea is rather simple. Voting creation would require some fee, based on number of votes and some base fee for operational costs. For institutional level votings, it is mostly an operational fee that depends on the number of voters and the Authentication Server integration complexity. We plan to work similarly to those guys https://polys.me

John the Status voting system, this is a perfect sample of a voting system Sorry, but in my opinion, the voting platform that requires metamask is made only for crypto users, and is far from being "perfect". Can you imagine the presidential elections that require metamask installed? As I wrote in the previous post, the implementation of your postulate is straightforward, and it's something I already added to timeline. Also the image you posted is a simple structure of all Stellar apps That's how the system is designed. Maybe the sequence diagram will clarify the concept. Here is an example based on Keybase authentication (same as https://stellarcommunity.fund/ ) works now. Voting creation Casting ballot NOTE: batching and cut-and-choose methods were skipped for simplicity. Blind-signature algorithm was simplified Counting results NOTE: TDS could be easily removed in domain-specific voting, by injecting metadata directly into webapp If you are interested how will it work for one-time authorization codes here are the diagrams.

stasbar I disagree with you Can you imagine the presidential elections that require Metamask installed? Yes, if you want to build that on the Ethereum you must be used Metamask for Auth. I think you have trouble understanding the dapp structure. Add basic authN & authZ methods (cookie, IP address, one-time link, one-time code, email, etc.). Are you kidding? How do you want to prove who they voted? I think you know what I mean And you're just defending your centralized project

John Excuse me, but where did I claim that this is dapp ? One place where I mentioned dapp is section 8. in my article, where I explain why it is NOT fully dapp. Only part of the system is decentralized, and I claim that this is enough to achieve outlined e-voting requirements. Since this system relies on a centralized authentication system, it inherits this property too. If you find a way to achieve decentralized auth on centralized identification provider, let me know, I will love to implement it. Since you start to humiliate me, I propose to stop our conversation.

stasbar Excuse me Stasbar I thought it is a dapp and your app is decentralized. Thank you for your answer

Stellot - e-Voting platform

trybal

stasbar

Give it a try, this voting is restricted to stellar.public team members only. Right now the membership is checked on-request, but we are thinking about freezing the list at the time of voting creation, to prevent sockpuppeting accounts.

I tried this but after loading for some time I got an error message: 'failed to fetch' and when trying again

API network error: Get https://api-0.core.keybaseapi.com/_/api/1.0/team/get.json?lookup_only=1&name=stellar.public&public=0: net/http: TLS handshake timeout (error 1601)

I guess keybase has some problems here.

stasbar

trybal
Yes, it was a temporary keybase api problem. The issue is that on each vote request, the authorization server needs to fetch the whole list of team members to determine if the user is present there. The Keybase API is quite slow, and it also can be down sometimes. The freezing membership list during voting creation would solve the problem, but it would block new users to participate in voting. I think that simple caching will do the job.

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