DIREC aims to bring the security proofs about protocols much closer to their implementation.

Here are four considerations that explain the unmet needs of this project.

1. Voting protocols, both in form of Blockchain Governance Protocols and Internet Voting Protocols have become increasingly popular and will be more widely deployed, as a result of an ongoing digitalization effort of democratic processes and also driven by the current pandemic.
2. Elections are based on trust, which means that election systems ideally should be based on algorithms and data structures that are already trusted. Blockchains provide such a technology. They provide a trusted bulletin board, which can be used as part of voting.
3. Voting crucially depends on establishing the identity of the voter to avoid fraud and to establish eligibility verifiability.
4. Any implementation created by a programmer, be it a Blockchain Governance Protocol or an Internet Voting Protocol can have bugs that quickly erode public confidence.

This project aims to shed more light on the overall research question, how to design high assurance blockchain governance software, and can such protocols scale to Internet Voting Protocols.