Recent years saw an increase in voting systems using public permissionless blockchains. Although public blockchains offer transparency and immutability, permissioned consensus is better suited for voting systems’ requirements, because an initial level of trust in authorities is always required. Hence, a permissioned Distributed Ledger (DL) immutably storing the voting system’s audit trail satisfies demands measurably.ProvotuMN 3.0 is a decentralized and receipt-Free (RF) voting system based on an end-to-end verifiable Re-Encryption Mixnet (RMN). RMNs allow for flexible votes and elections and decouple the ballot structure from the cryptographic voting protocol. Thus, ProvotuMN decentralizes trust (i) through the use of cryptographic shuffles and Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proofs (NIZKP) in an RMN executed among DL nodes, (ii) by employing a distributed key generation for election keys, and (iii) by offering a decentralized re-encryption service assuring RF. Performance evaluations performed indicate that the voting scheme is scalable for large-scale voting.

While the existence of Public Bulletin Boards (PBB) is often formulated as an assumption in related work on Remote Electronic Voting (REV) systems, this work here on Provotum focuses on the practical design and architecture of such a PBB, including its distributed execution. Further, Provotum leverages a public permissioned Blockchain (BC) as a PBB, where only authorized entities can sign blocks, while the general public can verify all BC data. Therefore, Provotum defines a new and fully decentralized BC-based REV system, which deploys a permissioned BC as a PBB and allows for the explicit distribution of trust across different permissioned BC nodes. Provotum is operated in a fully distributed fashion by using Smart Contracts (SC), Distributed Key Generation (DKG), Homomorphic Encryption (HE), and Cooperative Decryption (CD), as well as employing client-side encryption, which enables ballot secrecy, while the BC forms an audit trail, enabling public and End-to-end Verifiability (E2E-V).

Flaky tests are software tests that exhibit a seemingly random outcome (pass or fail) despite exercising unchanged code. In this work, we examine the perceptions of software developers about the nature, relevance, and challenges of flaky tests.