Always on Voting: A Framework for Repetitive Voting on the Blockchain

Elections are commonly repeated over longer and fixed intervals of time, ranging
from months to years. This results in limitations on governance since elected
candidates or policies are difficult to remove before the next election even
though they might be deemed detrimental to the majority of participants. When new
information is available, participants may decide (through a public deliberation)
to make amendments to their choice but have no opportunity to change their vote
before the next elections. Another issue is the peak-end effect where voters'
judgment is based on how they felt a short time before the elections, instead of
judging the whole period of the governance. Finally, there exist a few issues
related to centralized e-voting, such as censorship and tampering with the
results and data. To address these issues, we propose Always on Voting (AoV) ---
a repetitive blockchain-based voting framework that allows participants to
continuously vote and change elected candidates or policies without having to
wait for the next election. Participants are permitted to privately change their
vote at any point in time, while the effect of their change is manifested at the
end of each epoch whose duration is shorter than the time between two main
elections. To thwart the peak-end effect issue in epochs, the ends of epochs are
randomized and made unpredictable. While several blockchain-based e-voting
proposals had been already presented, to the best of our knowledge, none of them
addressed the issue of re-voting and peak-end effect.