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.