Implementation and Early Adoption of an Ethereum-Based Electronic Voting System for the Prevention of Fraudulent Voting

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for all the changes made.

Include a section highlighting the contributions.

Still, the document needs thorough proofreading. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In this article, The authors proposed an electronic voting system with blockchain technology. The main architecture of the system is presented in figure 4. Specific comments are as described below:

- Suggest the author remove "offline voting" as one of the keywords, because the occurrence in the article is too low.
- There are some blockchain-based electronic voting systems, suggesting the author make more surveys and compare to the latest technology.
- On page 5 line 216, the author mentioned IPFS in the sentence, the full name of the IPFS and reference are required.
- In figure 3, there are some flow and professional terms in figure 3, e.g. EVM, ABI, DAPP, more description of the figure is better.
- On page 8 lines 233-249, the description of the terms and steps is a bit weird, missing some description or title in the middle.
- In table 1, the author sorted that "electronic voting" has a low extendability, but "Ethereum-based electronic voting" is high, please explain why is it? how does it work?
- I think the transaction cost of every voting method should be also compared in Table 1.
- In the Ethereum architecture, the transaction of the DLT needs time (TPS), reviewer suggests author provide the benchmark of the system. (and also the environment for evaluation, e.g. number of peers, number of users, number of transactions in a second)
- Moreover, there are some fees and gas that need to be paid for every transaction, is it possible to make it online for a practical scene?

The article will become better if the authors can modify and provide more complete explanations.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

- The number of lines mentioned in the author's response to the question is almost incorrect.
- In Table 1, I think the author did not clearly describe the transaction cost of Ethereum. At the very least, the author should show that there are no issues with Ethereum's structure, such as transaction speed, transaction failure due to data conflict, and so on.
- The comparative analysis results are offered based on the author's perceptions, and there is no data to justify the analysis outcomes. If the author is testing in a test bed environment, you might be able to supply some test bed data. Otherwise, further literature to support the author's comparison results should be found.

Author Response

Thank you so much comment.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

There are some minor issues that needs to correct:

• Some punctuation marks and capitalization are wrong, for example in line 413, line 418...
• reference 32 is missing 
• In line 433, the full name of "TTP", "SPoF" should be given

Please take check it seriously for minor errors.

Author Response

Dear.  Reviewer

Thank you very much.

Please see the attachment file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The author had created a blockchain-based voting system based on the Merkel tree which is a need of the hour. The author has applied the Ehtereum blockchain too.

I am keen to understand the motivation, gap in the existing literature and contribution to the existing knowledge(most of them are missing).

It is recommended to read the following paper https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/17/5874/pdf which highlights the gap in the voting systems using blockchain.

The comparative analysis section is weakly written without proper validation. For eg., the author claimed the voter turnaround will be high(how without any implementation) and the election cost is low(it will be high as the infrastructure cost of blockchain also need to be included)

Author Response

Thank you for  comments about my paper sincerely. The English translation was requested by the MDPI publishing company. Please refer to the attached file for answers to comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper proposes an Electronic Voting System to Prevent Fraudulent Voting Based Blockchain. The work of this paper is practical and logical. However, I have to reject it because of the following problems: 
1. The Architecture of Merkel Tree Root in  Fig. 2. is suspected to be highly similar to Fig. 4 in the paper "Chen, Y.-C.; Chou, Y.-P.; Chou, Y.-C. An Image Authentication Scheme Using Merkle Tree Mechanisms. Future Internet 2019, 11, 149. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi11070149"

2. The quality of the figures in this paper is very poor.
3. The innovation of this paper is incremental and it is not novel enough.
4. The selection of key technologies in this paper is not rigorous enough and the authors do not design a reasonable experiment to compare key technologies. In addition, the explanation is not clear enough. For example, this paper chooses AES as the encryption algorithm, but the authors do not give a detailed explanation.

Author Response

Thank you for  comments about my paper sincerely. The English translation was requested by the MDPI publishing company. Please refer to the attached file for answers to comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for all the corrections made.

Still, the paper is lacking the core novelty. Even though the author had responded to it as an implementation, yet the details provided cannot be used to replicate the project.

It is a research paper, not a thesis.

Author Response

Thank you so much.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for all the updates.

Now the document reads slightly better. The following are the list of corrections :

1. Include the word "early adoption" in the title.
2. Redraw the Figures 2 and 4.
3. Include a detailed explanation of steps in Figure 4.
4. Include a specific section of contribution.
5. Include a specific section of risk and mitigation.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf