dVote (Decentralized-Vote)

Voter and electoral fraud are persistent problems endured by organisations of all types and sizes - from student governments to national governments. Examples of voter fraud are voting by impersonation and voting by ineligible voters. Electoral fraud can occur if election officials maliciously alter or remove ballots that are cast. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult for elections to be held in person, but organisations are weary of moving elections online due to concerns of cyberattacks or data manipulation.

 

To solve this problem, we leverage the blockchain techonology which aims to provides the necessary transparency and accountability in elections.

 

Read more about blockchain and how we leverage this technology in this report:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13X7lTKtGclTqntdPTq1MLEUttlsnWYv8Z6xc_NbXSEs/edit?usp=sharing

 

Demo

https://youtu.be/7_plgzm59Vc

Website

Status: Down

http://presentation.dvote.cloudns.cl/

 

Starting local frontend

Make a .env file in the frontend directory. With the following fields

REACT_APP_API_URL="..."

REACT_APP_FIREBASE_API_KEY="..."

REACT_APP_FIREBASE_AUTH_DOMAIN="..."

Replace the ... above with the following:

Put the URL of the backend server in the field REACT_APP_API_URL. Remove the domain and do NOT end the url in a forward slash.
In the other 2 fields put the firebase api key and auth domain which can be obtained from your firebase account.

Now, make sure you are in the blockchain-voting-system directory and run the following command

$ cd frontend && npm install

After all the project dependencies have been installed run the following in the frontend directory

$ npm start

The frontend will be accessible on localhost:3000

Note: For the frontend to work, the local server should also be running. To start the server look at the instructions below. Any interaction with blockchain requires some time. Please be patient

 

Starting local server

Note: To do this you will either need your own blockchain network or you can connect your own node to our network and enable JSON-RPC endpoints on it

Make a .env file in the backend directory. With the following fields

URL="..."

MNEMONIC="..."

DATABASE="..."

Replace the ... above with the following:

Put the URL of your blockchain node in the field URL.
Choose a 12 word mnemonic phrase to initialize the HDWallet. Put this phrase in the MNEMONIC field.
In the DATABASE field put the URL of the firebase database which can be obtained from your firebase console.

Next, download the firebase service account file from firebase console, rename it to service-account.json and put it in the backend directory.

Now, make sure you are in the blockchain-voting-system directory and run the following command

$ cd backend && npm install

After all the project dependencies have been installed run the following in the backend directory

$ npm start

The local server is listening on localhost:5000

To run just the server, refer to API.md on how to use the APIs using Postman or cURL
Note that since the server interacts with a blockchain, certain actions can take more time to respond since they need to be mined on the blockchain first.

Note: Any interaction with blockchain requires some time. Please be patient

 

Connecting to our blockchain network

Note: This isn't necessary to run our webapp. You can use this to manually verify the blockchain interactions that occur when using the webapp.

You can use Ethereum Clique protocol supporting clients like Geth to setup a node that connects to our blockchain network using:

networkid: 392
Use can use any of the following bootnodes:

• "enode://244c89873fba7ade0cc70084b1d225dd7ab7b3559fd7509cd270b7347fb09f85064b9c18b877c057f71351c19f2b780f61795763642f4f6a7928a7f850e6b8d3@104.154.251.135:30303"
• "enode://d7bd9a79d5abd38e66bf16d64f5fce1626fb09ebcd58b2db35acf4a238c6b937d76f6f539c5f35d1a1b2268a7faf40aaa98d58baaf99ea0c4a3c3ad5efc3d536@34.72.59.62:30303"
• "enode://f412d072de8d0577aed46c86d1674788f37b189d7033517e9298d1d9c85231f070c3e0bf01bf101f74f11eae314df7807f95002fe63bb31b19676c537e08d506@35.194.38.146:30303"