A Secure E-Voting System Using Blockchain Ethereum Technology and Smart Contracts

Abstract

Ensuring free and fair elections is the foundation of democratic nations, but conventional voting systems are still susceptible to manipulation, fraud, and inefficiencies. With the advancement of digital infrastructure, electronic voting (e-voting) has become a reality, but usually at the expense of transparency and security because of centralized control. Blockchain technology, and specifically Ethereum with its smart contract feature, provides a chance to transform voting systems through decentralization, immutability, and end-to-end verifiability. This suggests a next-generation e-voting system on the Ethereum blockchain with secure voter authentication, transparent vote casting, and smart contract-based automated result counting. Experimental results confirm the system\'s fraud resistance, scalability for medium-sized elections, and capability to present real-time, tamper-proof election results.

Introduction

Electoral integrity is vital for democracy, yet traditional voting systems face issues like inefficiency, security vulnerabilities, and lack of transparency. Paper ballots are prone to errors and tampering, while electronic voting machines (EVMs) risk hacking and misuse. Blockchain technology, especially Ethereum with programmable smart contracts, offers a promising solution by enabling secure, transparent, verifiable, and anonymous electronic voting.

Literature Review:
Recent research highlights blockchain’s potential to improve voting integrity, privacy, scalability, and auditability. Innovations include self-tallying protocols, privacy-enhancing cryptographic techniques (like zero-knowledge proofs), consortium blockchains for efficiency, cross-chain interoperability, biometric verification, and cost-reduction methods.

Proposed System:
The system uses Ethereum blockchain and consists of four modules: voter registration (secure identity linked to blockchain wallets), vote casting (via a decentralized app), blockchain storage (immutable, timestamped votes), and smart contracts (to validate votes, prevent duplicates, and compute results). Key features include decentralization, real-time transparency without compromising anonymity, automation, and strong security against fraud.

Methodology:
Built on Ethereum with Solidity smart contracts, interacting via MetaMask and Web3.js, and using IPFS for off-chain storage. Cryptographic tools like SHA-256 hashing, elliptic curve cryptography, and public key infrastructure secure vote integrity and voter authentication. The system demonstrated 100% accuracy, throughput suitable for mid-scale elections (~15 votes/sec), and a high F1 score indicating reliable vote detection.

Results:
Testing on Ethereum’s testnet with 500 simulated voters showed secure registration, prevention of double voting, compatibility with common wallets, and tamper resistance. Smart contract optimization reduced gas fees by 40%. Users appreciated the transparency, although wallet setup was noted as a usability hurdle.

Conclusion

The e-voting system over the Ethereum protocol put forward herein reveals that the application of blockchain can successfully address several major pitfalls found in the current voting framework. Through guarantying decentralization, safety, openness, and automation, the suggested scheme offers a true competitor for the next-generation election. Yet, constraints like blockchain scalability, cost of transactions, and ease of use need to be improved for nationwide-level deployments. Next-generation work will involve incorporating Layer-2 scaling solutions, biometric authentication, and zero-knowledge proof schemes to improve security and privacy even further. Compliance with legal systems is also crucial for real-world adoption in government elections.

References

[1] Liu, Y., & Wang, Q. (2017). An E-voting Protocol Based on Blockchain. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2017(1043). [2] McCorry, P., Shahandashti, S.F., & Hao, F. (2017). A Smart Contract for Boardroom Voting with Maximum Voter Privacy. Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 357–375. [3] Shahzad, B., & Crowcroft, J. (2019). Trustworthy Electronic Voting Using Adjusted Blockchain Technology. IEEE Access, 7, 24477–24488. [4] Racsko, P. (2019). Blockchain and Democracy. Social and Economic Review, 41, 353–369. [5] Yaga, D., Mell, P., Roby, N., & Scarfone, K. (2019). Blockchain Technology Overview. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.11078. [6] Chakraborty, S., Imran, M., & Hassan, M. (2019). Blockchain for Trustworthy Elections: A Review. IEEE Access, 7, 24477–24488. [7] Hardwick, F.S., et al. (2020). E-voting with Blockchain: An E-voting Protocol with End-to-End Verifiability. Journal of Information Security and Applications, 50. [8] Brown, T., et al. (2020). Language Models are Few-Shot Learners. NeurIPS. [9] Zhang, H., et al. (2023). Cross-Lingual Plagiarism Detection Using Transformer-Based Models. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 20(5). [10] Aoki, K., & Shibata, N. (2023). Hybrid Blockchain Voting with Off-Chain SMPC. IEEE Transactions on Blockchain, 4(3), 556–567. [11] Patel, R., Singh, N., & Roy, S. (2024). Layer-2 Solutions for Scalable Blockchain Voting Systems. IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing. [12] Garcia, L., Fernandez, A., & Russo, G. (2024). zk-SNARKs for Transparent yet Private Blockchain Voting. ACM Journal of Blockchain and Privacy, 3(1). [13] Rahman, F., & Chowdhury, H. (2024). Fee-less Blockchain Voting via Transaction Sponsorship and Batching. Journal of Financial Cryptography, 29(4). [14] Khan, M., & Ahmed, A. (2025). Biometric-Enhanced Blockchain Voting: Privacy and Security. Journal of Cryptographic Engineering. [15] Nguyen, T., Vo, D., & Bui, P. (2025). Cross-Chain Voting Architecture Using PolkadotParachains. International Journal of Distributed Ledger Technologies, 7(2).

Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Dr. T. V. Sai Krishna, Amrutha Vishwas, Konda Aashritha, Uppula Siddu, PAkshay Goud. 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.