Distributed-Ledger-Based Blockchain Technology for Reliable Electronic Voting System with Statistical Analysis

Abstract

In today’s society, voting is crucial to choosing the representatives of the people. The current voting process is filled with a vast array of disputes and manipulations. The leader must be selected in a precise manner without any malpractices. In addition, the people and authorities are not happy with the election results and label them unpredictable. We offer a better solution to the current problems, such as tampering, non-residents voting outside of the polling place, quick results analysis, quick counting, and reduced use of staff and funds during the electoral franchise process. In this offer, blockchain technology is used to create the distributed application (dApp) framework that will be used for the proposed e-voting system. Additionally, it offers unique characteristics such as immutability, transparency, privacy, and reception freedom that reduce crimes involving the processing of sensitive data in the electoral process. Ganache, MetaMask, and specified dagger hashing algorithm are used to develop the dApp. A key strength of this paper is the statistical analysis of transactions on the blockchain. Moreover, it also provides security to voters’ identity and leads to immediate acceptable counting results with more accuracy.

1. Introduction

Electronic voting (sometimes known as e-voting) is a mode of voting in which votes are cast and counted via electronic methods. E-voting may employ freestanding electronic voting machines (EVM) or computers connected to the Internet, depending on the implementation. It might include a variety of Internet services, ranging from simple transmission of tabulated results to full-function online voting via ordinary connectable household devices. Persons with limitations can have full access to electronic voting machines. Electronic machines can use headphones, sip-and-puff, foot pedals, joysticks, and other adaptive technology to provide the necessary accessibility. Punched card and optical scan machines are not fully accessible for the blind or visually impaired, and lever machines can be difficult for voters with limited mobility and strength. Blockchain ensures transparency by storing information in such a way that it cannot be altered without recording the changes made using the necessary encryption and control mechanisms.

The necessity of a paper trail in connection with EVMs is acknowledged on a global scale. In several countries, electronic voting was implemented. The security, precision, dependability, and verifiability of electronic elections, however, were quickly disputed. The types of hacking are always evolving, and the advisors for Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) identified that when two wires were soldered together (the “diode and triode period”), the data can be tampered with. They are unable to refute the claim made by worldwide experts that no electronic device has ever been created that cannot be tampered with or compromised. Concerns have grown for years that political opponents or foreign powers could manipulate voters or even entire elections. Even if it is not possible to influence an election’s outcome, attempts at manipulation will cause frustration and uncertainty. These doubts are poisonous to any democracy because they undermine the foundations of our political system, namely the need for basic trust in the legality of electoral decisions and respect for the wishes of the majority. They have the potential to cast doubt on democracy itself, especially at a time when it is up against formidable foes such as autocrats, populists, and other opponents of pluralism.

Blockchain technology was developed to address these problems, and it now provides decentralized nodes for electronic voting. Blockchain technology is used to develop electronic voting systems primarily due to the advantages of end-to-end verification. This technology is a great alternative to traditional electronic voting systems since it has distributed, non-repudiation, and security protection characteristics. The security of remote participation must be practical for a blockchain-based electronic voting system to be scalable, and transaction speed needs to be addressed. These issues have led to the conclusion that the current frameworks needed to be modified before being used in voting systems.

The remaining paper is organized in the following way: In Section 2, recent works are discussed. Materials and methods are discussed in Section 3. Section 4 discusses the proposed methodology. Section 5 addresses results and analysis.

2. Literature Survey

X. Yang, X. Yi et al. [1] suggested a solution that combines public blockchain and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to ensure that all conventional voting system criteria are satisfied while also providing protection against malevolent adversaries with administrative access. The SGX checks the vote’s eligibility and authenticity and encrypts it within the SGX enclave. Fingerprints (i.e., the hash values) of the encrypted votes are published on the public blockchain ledger before the deadline of the election. All encrypted votes are disclosed until the deadline. The main limitations of this work are Intel SGX Cache timing attacks and a lack of protection against side-channel attacks.

F. D. Giraldo et al. [2] proposed the idea to use blockchain and other technologies to enable an electronic voting system for the election of unique candidates. They used Ethereum Smart Contracts and the cryptographic security of public and private keys in order to evaluate blockchain technology as a potential replacement for current voting systems. This was accomplished through the specification of an architecture created specifically for electoral processes. The disadvantage of this study is its inability to be scaled and shared networks.

S. Gupta et al. [3] critically examined the evolution and present condition of blockchain-based online voting systems, its features and limitations, as well as quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography breakthroughs. They offer a structure of the system for an online voting system that uses post-quantum cryptography, as well as methodical and critical viewpoints and findings on quantum-resistant blockchain for such a system in the future. The major drawbacks of this work are large key sizes and performance costs and non-ideal scalability.

S. Donepudi et al. [4] introduced this methodology based on blockchain that uses a cryptographic signature known as a hash to record transactions for the online voting process. Several blockchain voting mechanisms/strategies have been suggested by various scholars. The purpose of this article is to compare and contrast blockchain voting technologies with a “Performance Driven Framework for Mass e-Voting” leveraging Hyperledger Caliper. The drawbacks are underutilization due to performance limitations imposed by species and charge transports.

D. K and U. K et al. [5] discussed that creating a crowd in the existing scenario of COVID-19 also adds a lot of complications. As a result, in such a situation, the online voting system will be a huge success in the election. However, the online system’s security and transparency raise certain concerns. Incorporating blockchain into online e-voting will eliminate all of these flaws. The method allows voters to register and vote for any candidate. The vote will be saved in a secure blockchain, but all other information, such as the voter’s name, city, and whether they voted or not, will be accessible to anybody via the website. This system will provide security by denying duplication of votes. One of the limitations is that block votes can have unpredictable and often undesirable impacts on election outcomes.

A. Parmar et al. [6] proposed a blockchain-based decentralized national e-voting system. It provides an admin interface for scheduling voting, managing candidates, and declaring results. At the time of voting, the online application will prompt users to provide their Aadhar card ID (unique Indian ID) as text input and a photo of themselves. The voter’s eligibility will be verified when they submit their Aadhar card ID. The phone numbers of eligible voters will be confirmed using a One Time Password (OTP). Individual voters will be regarded as eligible to vote after voter verification. Voters will be observed using a webcam/front camera while voting. The votes will be maintained in a blockchain, and any tampering will be instantly recognized. The voting results will be declared on a specified date and will be handled by the administrator. The main limitations are a greater threat to individual and societal privacy.

S. T. Alvi et al. [7] proposed a blockchain-based e-voting system. Blockchain has a variety of benefits that will alter the traditional system. However, Ethereum-based blockchain implementation is costly because each transaction has a processing fee. The authors have taken advantage of this principle to develop a low-cost blockchain-based voting system since sidechains extend the functionality of blockchains by doing additional actions outside of it with duplicate currency and returning the results to the mainchain for use. The disadvantages are insecurity and lack of transparency.

In order to create an anonymous cloaking region and meet the requirements of both the request vehicle and the cooperative vehicle, as well as combining the traits of these two roles, the authors in [8] developed a blockchain-enabled trust-based location privacy protection scheme in the VANET. It ensures that both the requester and the cooperator will only work with vehicles they trust [9].

Verifiable Query language (VQL) is a query-based service provider for the blockchain system. H. Wu et al. [10] used Ethereum blockchain, Rinkeby, and cloud environment to test the proposed system. H. Wang et al. [11] proposed a searchable blockchain system that uses two query searches mechanism. The proposed system doesn’t have separate query search-supported system that can reduce the complexity of the application system in terms of time and space. The summary of the literature survey is depicted in

Table 1. Literature Survey Summary.

Author	Administrator	BCT Type	Statistical Analysis	Distributed Application	Design/ Develop
[12]	Not Existed	Private-Bit Coin	No	Yes	Design
[13]	Not Existed	Private-Bit Coin	Part	Yes	Both
[14]	Not Existed	Private-Bit Coin	No	Yes	Design
[15]	Not Existed	Private-Bit Coin	No	Yes	Design
[16]	Yes	Private-Ark	No	Yes	Design
[17]	Not Existed	Public-Ethereum	No	Yes	Design
[18]	Not Existed	Public-Ethereum	No	Yes	Design
[19]	Not Existed	Not mentioned	No	Yes	Analysis
Proposed Model	Yes	Public-Ethereum	Yes	Yes	Both

.

3. Material and Methods

To implement the proposed framework, we used the following system setup: Intel^® Core ™ i7 -8550U CPU @ 1.80 GHz, 16 GB RAM, and 64-bit processor on Windows 10. To design and deploy blockchain-based smart contracts, we used Ganache to set up an Ethereum public blockchain. MetaMask, which is a browser extension cryptocurrency wallet, was also used. Furthermore, Solidity was used to develop and deploy the required smart contracts, which can be deployed on EVM. An overview of the voting system qualification testing is given in this section. The process of demonstrating that a voting system complies with the standards and the conditions of its certification are known as qualification testing.

Problem Statement

The people and authorities are not happy with the election results and label them unpredictable. We can offer a better solution to the current problems, such as tampering, non-residents voting outside of the polling place, quick results analysis, quick counting, and reduced use of staff and funds during the electoral franchise process. Blockchain technology is used to create the distributed application (dApp) framework that will be used for the proposed e-voting system. Additionally, it has unmatched characteristics such as immutability, transparency, privacy, and receipt freedom that limit the number of crimes involving the processing of sensitive data in the electoral franchise system. The dApp was created using Ganache, MetaMask, and the provided dagger hashing algorithm. Additionally, it ensures the privacy of each voter and produces quicker, more accurate results when the votes are counted.

Eth coins: Ethereum processing stage depends on the blockchain, which opens a working framework with a keen agreement process. This supports a modified variation of Nakamoto’s results by the exchange-based condition [20]. Ether is a digital currency created by Ethereum and is used to reward digging-hubs for calculations. Each eth account has an eth equivalent and can start with one record and move to the next.

Ganache: Ganache is utilized to run an individual Ethereum blockchain for decentralized applications. Moreover, It is used to create, test, compile and execute smart contracts.

Metamask: It is a digital currency wallet utilized on Chrome, Firefox, and other programs. MetaMask is also used to store keys for Ethereum digital currencies. Metamask does not need any login and does not store any private keys in any worker, and all the passcodes are exceptionally secured [21,22]. The main problems encountered while using Metamask only supports Ethereum and Ethereum Request Comment (ERC20) token. ERC20 token is a standard that used to create and issue smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain

Solidity: Solidity is a statically composed programming language intended for creating keen agreements that sudden spike in demand for EVM. EVM implies Ethereum Virtual Machine [23]. Here, the designers can design applications that can be actualized by utilizing self-authorizing business rationale encapsulated in shrewd agreements, definitive records of exchange, and no reputation.

Smart contracts: Smart contracts check, authorize, or execute a shrewd agreement, and it is a PC convention. Keen agreements permit us to play out the exchanges without outsiders. The wise deal enables us to share cash, offers, or property. Smart contracts have rules and punishments for a specific concurrent transaction [24,25,26,27,28,29]. Every new arrangement should create new principles and penalties for each agreement and naturally uphold those commitments.

Creation of a Smart Contract: Smart contracts are a commonly made programming language called “Solidity”, which is practically like the dialects C++ and JavaScript. Dialects such as Vyper and Bamboo are additionally utilized.

Contract: In all the top programming dialects, they allow clients to pass functions legally, and some low-level programming dialects use the stack to provide attributes for efficiency. In any case, an electronic democratic machine uses a 256-piece register stack in which ongoing 16 things can be controlled or gotten to once.

Deploying a Smart Contract: An exchange is made without addressing when a smart contract is executed. Additionally, some bytecodes are included as information. These bytecodes go about as constructors, which are expected to compose starting factors to store before replicating the runtime bytecode to contracts code [30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37]. The bytecode has to run once in it, and a runtime bytecode has to run on each agreement call.

4. Proposed Methodology

The proposed system improves the integrity and privacy of the present conventional-based electoral franchise system due to blockchain’s additional features. Transparency is the best way to prevent all forms of rigging, whether at the polling station, during the count, or during aggregation. In this application, for each candidate or contestant, a block must be allotted over a blockchain. Electors’ votes are maintained as transactions in the block. Dependent on citizens, a unique BCTID (blockchain innovation ID) is created by considering their credentials. Additionally, face or fingerprint or some other biometrics are considered for avoiding infringement. As citizens seek enlistment and are enrolled, they must obtain their BCTID to cast a ballot. At the time a citizen goes to vote the ballot, the voter must be verified by the assigned unique BCTID by considering their proof submitted at the time of initial registration. This feature helps to reduce fraudulent votes and can be easily verified as a legitimate voter. After that point, the elector can cast a ballot for the candidate they need to decide in favor of. If the citizen goes to the polling office without the BCTID, they have to obtain Eth from an approved individual. Then, they have to be allocated with a BCTID and can go for the democratic cycle. This blockchain innovation can be utilized in different fields for making clinical records, making a computerized legal official (i.e., e-public accountant), and in any other event, such as gathering charges, as shown in Figure 1.

The blockchain system uses the asymmetric cryptographic system through public key and private key pairs [38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48]. These key pairs are randomly generated pairs and are also one-way-based. Each block consists of a unique address that has been evaluated from the public key and Markel hash function. Hence, users can monitor immutable transactions. All nodes that are in the network should approve if anyone would like to do any alterations or modifications. Furthermore, it is not possible to make any alterations or update the data over the network. Moreover, it is an interconnected blocks-based technology [42,43,44,45,46,47,48]. All the record transactions are directly assigned with the session and transaction keys that act as personalized digital signatures. This safe Electronic Democratic Framework utilizing blockchain innovation holds various modules. Those are party/candidate enrollment, BCT-based citizen ID creation, elector enlistment cycle, and casting a ballot cycle.

To reduce the crimes on sensitive data processing in the electoral franchise system, we create file back-ups, data back-ups, and back-up bandwidth abilities. This will help a company to retain its information in the event of extortion.

4.1. Contestant Block Creation

Initially, a unique block is generated for each contestant. This process depends on the Eth balance of a contestant account. If a contestant has a sufficient cryptocurrency (Eth/Gas) balance, it can generate a block. If there is no adequate balance for developing a block, it is not possible to create a block. The required credit has to be credited into the wallet from external sources to continue the block creation process, as shown in Figure 1 and Algorithm 1. Here, the currency name is Eth and gas is considered a commodity. The gas fee will be refunded in Eth currency. Gas prices are quoted in gwei [27]. In this application, solidity programming is used to create a block for each eligible contestant.

Algorithm 1: Block Creation

Input:    Contestant Details, Eth Balance Output:    Creation of a Block Process:     Take contestant details.     for j = Contestant ‘1’ to Contestant ‘n’ do     Check Eth_balance     If Eth_Balance ≥ Threshold_cost then a block (block [j]) is created, otherwise no block is created.     Eth_balance←(Eth_balance—Threshold_cost)

4.2. Blockchain ID Creation and Allotment for Voter

Using the Ganache platform, a distinct blockchain-based identity (BCTID) is created for each citizen. All voters need to first register, after which a special BCTID will be assigned to them. Algorithm 2 demonstrates the suggested system procedure, which enables online registrations, using a DAPP built on an Ethereum-based public blockchain foundation.

Algorithm 2: Unique ID Creation (BCTID) for Voter

Input:    Electors credentials Output:    BCTID generates. Process:     All voters take registration through frontend-based DAPP.     For i = ‘Voter 1’ to ‘Voter n’ do     Voter [i] ← BCT_ID[i]//A unique BCTID allotted to the voters     Where n = No. of balloters

As shown in Algorithm 3, when the electors go for the vote, they have to validate their BCTID. If it is a valid BCTID, they can go for the electing process. If the citizens’ BCTID is not valid or the citizens are not registered yet, then they need to purchase the cryptocurrency from an approved person. Later, that citizen is going to be assigned with a BCTID. Then, they have to choose to vote, verify the BCTID if it is a legitimate BCTID, then redirect to the contestants block.

Algorithm 3: Electing Process

Input:    Blockchain-based unique ID i.e BCTID Output:    Vote transaction creation into a block Process:        Initially, Elector registration verified.        For i = 1 to n do     If BCT_ID(Elector [i]) exists then they can use their voting right otherwise request for registration. Elector vote stores into a block (block [j]) as a transaction.

5. Results

The proposed blockchain based distributed application (dApp) provides a secure voting system with the following features: privacy, convenience, receipt and physical tally or count freeness, and cost and fraud voting reduction. The model uses the smart contracts of add_voter ( ), start_vote ( ), do_vote ( ), total_votes ( ) and total_voters ( ). Figure 2 shows MetaMask-based eth balance that has to be used to perform the operations of a proposed system. Generally, gas (in terms of Eth) is required to call the functions by the regulatory authority.

Table 2. System operations with gas cost.

Caller	Function Name	Gas Cost	TxN Size (In Bytes)
Administrator	Add_Voter ( )	0.001138	132 bytes
Administrator	Start_Vote ( )	0.000861	4 bytes
Vote Holder	Do_Vote ( )	0.01619	36 bytes
Administrator	Total_votes ( )	0.15879	8 bytes
Administrator	Total_voters ( )	0.1138	8 bytes

shows the gas consumption cost for each operation over the blockchain.

Table 3. Eth consumption for votes.

No. of Votes	Gas			Eth (Total)
	Limit (Units)	Cost	Price (CGWEI)
1	71,894	0.01138	20	0.001138
10	56,894	0.1138	20	0.01138
20	113,748	0.2276	20	0.02276
30	170,682	0.3414	20	0.03414
40	227,576	0.4552	20	0.04552
50	284,470	0.5690	20	0.0569
100	5,689,400	0.11380	20	0.01138

and Figure 3 represent the ETH balance consumption to process the votes in the Ganache-based Ethereum blockchain. In this work, we tested cryptocurrency (ETH) consumption rate by considering 100 votes. Furthermore, Table 3 shows the gas consumption for a specific number of votes.

Table 4. Smart contracts operational cost over blockchain environment.

From Address: 0x2863B2f5ECE0de3aafc1eE5500e7E4ac6E852Ae5
To Address: 0xC31DDe674098rftv897hfty4BGOI2RS876e5987Td004
Function	Amount Gas Used	Fee (TxN)	Hash (TxN)	Block Details (Mined)	Size of a Block (Bytes)	Nonce (TxN)	Index (TxN)
addVoter ( )	1138	0.001138 Eth	0x1649261e01550957dd8baa8527790ca1f7526fda956d93ce6f229f90bcf1b993	57	132	40	57
startVote ( )	861	0.000861 Eth	0x615ec41c5b56707566933a741346a5f1e4941045ed36e009fefec2c86817c3a3	168	4	150	168
doVote ( )	1619	0.01619 Eth	0xb71c0b33b37b034e4c879d21648952d0f04a012d05e3f83b19e6c8334cc25d54	170	36	162	172
Totalvotes ( )	15,879	0.15879 Eth	0x34c895c20880c429595ef922b23bd5194a43aec3181a046414b07237d3b460a8	187	8	175	178
Totalvoters ( )	1138	0.1138 Eth	0x4316Fb7f44E2715c614C15B9aB62b6a3184aa84c007763213d394d66	194	8	179	182

shows the operational cost of every smart contract function in the blockchain environment.

Figure 4 and Figure 5 show the proof of the transaction over a blockchain from Ganache. It consists of details of the transaction such as hash value (Txn Hash), block number of the transaction, and transaction fee (Txn Fee), from address and to address.

Table 5. Comparison with existing related works.

Authors	Application	Blockchain Tool	Application	Performance Analysis
[36]	UAV Data	Remix	Not dApp	Functional and non-functional requirements based
[37]	Voting	Designed	Not dApp	Not analyzed
[38]	Voting	Designed	Not dApp	Not analyzed
[39]	Token Transaction	Designed	Not dApp	Functional requirements Based
[40]	Medical Certificates	Test RPC	dApp	Functional and non-functional requirements based
[41]	Vehicular Network	Hyperledger	dApp	Functional requirements Based
[42]	IoT	Designed	Not dApp	Non-functional requirements Based
[43]	IoT	Designed	Not dApp	Not Analyzed
[44]	Blockshare: Prototype for data sharing	Python & Solidity	Not dApp	Non-functional requirements based
[45]	Scaling blockchain	Hyperledger	Not dApp	Functional requirements based
[46]	Lineage Chain: Blockchain system	Hyperledger	Not dApp	Functional Requirements
[47]	Arithmetic circuits	Symme Proof: A protocol	Not dApp	Non-functional requirements based
[48]	Lineage Chain: Blockchain system	Hyperledger	Not dApp	Functional Requirements
Proposed System	Voting	Ganache	dApp	Functional and Non-functional requirements based

shows the comparison of the proposed system with existing related works.

6. Conclusions

An online voting system must be able to show proof that it effectively upheld election integrity and that there was no fraud committed during the voting or tallying procedures. The necessity to confirm the precision and correctness of the decrypting procedure without disclosing private decryption key information or voter identities makes it difficult to achieve this degree of verifiability. The paper contributes the following: identifying the holes in the present e-voting system; evaluating existing blockchain-based e-voting systems; and the potential for the blockchain idea to enhance e-voting systems by classifying the major current problems into five categories: general, integrity, coin-based, privacy, and consensus. In this work, we utilized Ethereum to implement a blockchain-based e-voting system. In the future, an e-voting system based on a private blockchain with a digital signature feature can be implemented.