E-Voting System Based on Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain technology offers a decentralized, tamper-resistant ledger that is well-suited to address the longstanding challenges of traditional and centralized electronic voting systems. This paper presents the design and implementation of a blockchain-based e-voting system that leverages Ethereum smart contracts to ensure transparent, secure, and verifiable elections. Registered voters are authenticated using a unique cryptographic identity and cast votes that are immutably recorded on the distributed ledger. The system eliminates single points of failure, prevents double voting, and enables real-time public auditability without compromising voter anonymity. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed system achieves high transaction throughput, low latency, and robust security against common attack vectors. The paper also provides a comparative analysis with traditional and centralized e-voting approaches, illustrating clear advantages in transparency, integrity, and cost efficiency.

Introduction

This paper proposes a secure and transparent electronic voting system built on the Ethereum blockchain using Solidity smart contracts. Traditional paper-based voting suffers from issues such as ballot manipulation, low participation, and inefficiency, while centralized e-voting systems remain vulnerable to cyberattacks, insider threats, and single points of failure. Blockchain technology addresses these challenges through decentralization, immutability, and transparency.

The literature review highlights previous blockchain voting research that improved voter authentication, anonymity, auditability, and decentralized vote storage. However, challenges such as scalability, gas costs, mobile accessibility, and integration with national identity systems remain unresolved.

The proposed system follows an eight-stage workflow:

1. Voter registration linked to national identity records (e.g., Aadhaar).
2. Two-factor authentication (2FA) using OTP verification.
3. Whitelisting of verified voter wallet addresses.
4. Dynamic generation of cryptographic ballots.
5. Vote casting with private-key digital signatures.
6. Smart contract validation to prevent unauthorized or duplicate voting.
7. Recording votes on a permissioned blockchain using Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus.
8. Real-time vote tallying and public audit through blockchain event logs.

The voting rules are enforced by smart contracts running on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), ensuring vote integrity and preventing double voting. The system uses a permissioned Ethereum network with PoA consensus to achieve fast transaction confirmation and low operational costs.

Experimental testing on local and test blockchain networks showed strong performance, handling 10,000 simulated votes with an average confirmation time of 2.3 seconds and approximately 42,000 gas units consumed per vote. The results indicate that the proposed blockchain-based voting system offers improved security, transparency, auditability, and efficiency compared to traditional paper voting and centralized e-voting approaches.

Conclusion

This paper presented a blockchain-based e-voting system that harnesses the Ethereum network and smart contracts to deliver a transparent, secure, and auditable election infrastructure. The system protects voter anonymity through cryptographic pseudonymity, prevents double voting via on-chain state enforcement, and provides immutable audit trails accessible to the public and election observers alike. Comparative evaluation demonstrates clear superiority over both traditional paper-based and centralized electronic voting systems across security, transparency, auditability, and cost dimensions. Performance testing confirms practical viability with sub-3-second transaction finality under PoA consensus. Future enhancements will explore layer-2 scaling solutions to reduce latency for high-throughput national elections, zero-knowledge proofs for enhanced voter privacy, and mobile-first DApp interfaces to improve accessibility for rural populations. Integration with Aadhaar-based biometric authentication is also planned to strengthen the identity verification layer.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Khairnar Mohit Prakash, Shewale Ved Rupesh, Mhaske Aditya Kishor, Sonawane Harshal Dinesh. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.