Why MACI Matters
To understand the promise of on-chain voting and the purpose of MACI, we highly recommend reading Vitalik's post on blockchain voting. He provides an overview of the incredible potential of e-voting and why blockchains are an excellent technology to implement e-voting solutions on top of.
Below we attempt to summarize some of the points laid out in that post:
Security requirements of a voting system
Any voting system requires a few crucial security properties in order to be trusted by users:
- Correct execution: the result (tally of votes) must be correct, and the result must be guaranteed by a transparent process (so that everyone is convinced that the result is correct)
- Censorship resistance: anyone eligible to vote should be able to vote, and it should not be possible to interfere with anyone's attempt to vote or to prevent anyone’s vote from being counted
- Privacy: you should not be able to tell which candidate someone specific voted for, or even if they voted at all
- Coercion resistance: you should not be able to prove to someone else how you voted, even if you want to
Voting systems
Looking at various approaches to implement a voting system, we can see how they compare across these properties.
In-person voting systems
In short, it's hard to know for sure how current voting systems operate. Governments and corporations spend lots of resources on their systems and processes in an attempt to ensure their integrity, but ultimately neither the systems nor the processes are fully auditable, so we must trust that these security properties are being enforced.
| In-person | |
|---|---|
| Correct execution | 🤷♂️ |
| Censorship resistance | 🤷♂️ |
| Privacy | 🤷♂️ |
| Collusion resistance | 🤷♂️ |
Blockchain voting systems
Blockchains provide two key properties: correct execution and censorship resistance. In terms of execution, the blockchain accepts inputs (transaction) from users, correctly processes them according to some pre-defined rules, and returns the correct output. No one is able to change the rules. Any user that wants to send a transaction and is willing to pay a high enough fee can send the transaction and expect to see it quickly included on-chain.
By default, however, Blockchain voting applications face challenges. Ethereum, like most blockchains, is completely transparent - all transaction data is public, so there is no privacy for voters or their votes. This makes bribery very easy as a result: someone can easily show a transaction receipt that proves how they voted. In some cases, bribery can be completely automated via smart contracts to make collusion entirely trustless.
| In-person | Ethereum | |
|---|---|---|
| Correct execution | 🤷♂️ | ✅ |
| Censorship resistance | 🤷♂️ | ✅ |
| Privacy | 🤷♂️ | ❌ |
| Collusion resistance | 🤷♂️ | ❌ |
Blockchain voting systems (with ZKPs)
Enter zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), which when combined with blockchains like Ethereum, can enable private on-chain voting but maintain public on-chain results that are verifiable by anyone (including smart contracts). Vote tallying takes place off-chain but ZKPs are submitted and verified on-chain, which guarantees votes are counted correctly without revealing the individual votes.
| In-person | Ethereum | Ethereum w/ ZK | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Correct execution | 🤷♂️ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Censorship resistance | 🤷♂️ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Privacy | 🤷♂️ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Collusion resistance | 🤷♂️ | ❌ | ✅ |
This, in essence, is why MACI exists. By combining these technologies in novel ways, we believe we can achieve all the core security properties that a voting system must have.