Blockchain Technology: A Critical Review and Its Proposed Use in E-Voting in India

In 2009, the evolution of the blockchain technology was the foundation of the first ever cryptocurrency, bitcoin. It not just changed the financial industry but also proved to be a major break-through for peer-to-peer data transfer, information exchange having high security, efficiency, and transparency. Blockchain is a database of records which is distributed on the network, or we can say, its a public ledger of all transactions that have executed and are shared between every user on that blockchain network. Some of its characteristics include anonymity, irreversibility, immutability, decentralization and persistence. It has found applications and use in almost all fields which require data sharing but with secure authentication, anonymity and permanence. Some of the areas of its application are finance, real-estate and IoT. In this paper we discuss the blockchain technology and its fundamentals, its working, types of blockchain, applications, advantages, disadvantages and some other aspects in details. In this research paper, we introduce a model of e-voting as a CASE study which is developed in decentralised environment on the Ethereum blockchain. Using the concept of Blockchain, e-voting will assist to strengthen security and integrity of the election system reducing the cost while increasing the privacy. The use of encryption helps to provide security to the system. No intruder can gain access to the voting system and tamper it and in this way, EVMs can’t be accused of being fixed.