Blockchain in inter-organizational collaboration: A privacy-preserving voting system for collective decision-making

Abstract

Electronic voting systems can support a key behavioral process in inter-organizational collaboration – collective decision-making – but typically face challenges related to single points of failure from centralized databases and trusted third parties to deal with privacy voting requirements. To address such issues, this work presents a decentralized voting system based on blockchain technology, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, tokenization, and Proof-of-Stake mechanisms to promote the system’s sustainability while enhancing voting privacy and anonymization. Our solution introduces verifiability to voting processes without any trusted intermediaries. We use the inter-organizational collaboration use case since it introduces additional voting requirements in the private domain, such as promoting cooperative behavioral processes to develop trustworthy relationships between organizations. Our proof-of-concept implementation and evaluation results show that the proposed solution provides voting privacy with adequate computational costs.