A Scalable and Verifiable Blockchain‑Based E‑Voting Framework for

Transparent, Secure and User‑Centric Democratic Elections

S. Kannadhasan

, Pilli Lalitha Kumari

, R. V. Kavya

, M. Sugamathi

Vignesh V.

and M. Soma Sabitha

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Study World College of Engineering Coimbatore - 641 105,

Tamil Nadu, India

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Visakha Institute of Engineering & Technology, 88th Division, Narava

Visakhapatnam - 530027 Andhra Pradesh, India

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, J.J. College of Engineering and Technology, Tiruchirappalli,

Tamil Nadu, India

Department of MBA, Department of Management Studies, Nandha Engineering College, Vaikkalmedu, Tamil Nadu, India

Department of CSE, New Prince Shri Bhavani College of Engineering and Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, MLR Institute of Technology, Hyderabad‑500043, Telangana, India

Keywords: Blockchain Voting, Electoral Integrity, Decentralized Identity, Secure e‑Voting, Verifiable Elections.

Abstract: All measures toward safeguarding the sanctity and transparency of the elections are essential for strengthening

democracy. This study presents a scalable and verifiable blockchain e-voting framework that overcomes

existing e-voting systems' issues including high computation overhead, lack of usability, low level of

transparency, and low legal compliance. In contrast to prior art, the present model leverages light-weight

cryptographic algorithms, decentralized identity checks and open-source model to provide a secure, privacy

preserving and user-friendly voting. The system provides real-time auditability, end-to-end verifiability, and

resistance to coercion and vote manipulating attacks with efficiency and adaptability to multiple deployment

scenarios. Through extensive simulations and prototyping on blockchain testnet, the designed system achieves

high throughput, low latency and is abiding by regulatory constraints, thus laying a solid foundation for the

trusted and transparent democratic process in the digital era.

1 INTRODUCTION

The quality of democracy depends on the integrity,

transparency, and inclusiveness of the election

process. Nonetheless, paper ballots-based as well as

electronic voting systems (EVMs) are being seen

with great suspicion due to serious issues of

corruption and the lack of transparency, manipulation

of votes, delayed counting of votes and just the fact

that it is not feasible for underprivileged or remote

voters to access these systems. Demand for the secure

and verifiable online vote has been growing in recent

years, particularly due in part to challenges such as

international instability and technical trends that are

causing civic infrastructure to go digital at a faster

pace.

Blockchain, as it is decentralized and immutable

and can be easily verified, provides an ideal solution

to transform the way elections are held. But a variety

of blockchain-based voting systems sting from

numerous weaknesses such as high computational

complexity, proprietary limitations, inadequate real-

world implementation, and unfriendly for voters to

use. These factors are a roadblock to mass adoption

and lowers the trust in digital voting.

This paper fills these gaps by proposing a new e-

voting framework that leverages blockchain to

achieve scalability, user friendliness, transparency,

and legal suitability. It leverages state-of-the-art

cryptographic technology, decentralized identity

systems, and open source software to enable secure,

privacy preserving, and anonymous participation for

eligible voters at scale. Furthermore, the

infrastructure provides for real-time auditability and

resistance to coercion, thus enabling it to serve

national elections as well as decentralized

organization voting.

486

Kannadhasan, S., Kumari, P. L., Kavya, R. V., Sugamathi, M., V., V. and Sabitha, M. S.

A Scalable and Veriﬁable Blockchain-Based E-Voting Framework for Transparent, Secure and User-Centric Democratic Elections.

DOI: 10.5220/0013931800004919

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Research and Development in Information, Communication, and Computing Technologies (ICRDICCT‘25 2025) - Volume 5, pages

486-492

ISBN: 978-989-758-777-1

In this way, the paper contributes to the academic

debate on secure e-governance and has a deployable

and practical solution that future democracies could

use to innovate the election system, in order to restore

the public trust in the election process.

2 PROBLEM STATEMENT

Although huge strides are made in electronic voting

systems, preserving the integrity, transparency and

robustness of the electoral process in general is still

a major global challenge. Legacy voting models are

susceptible to manipulation, are not auditable in real

time, and offer poor accessibility, which can be

particularly problematic in remote or crisis areas.

Additionally, most of the current blockchain voting

systems are computationally expensive, have

complex user interfaces, lack strong user anonymity

due to the use of KYC-adhering blockchains and

even go as far as enforcing proprietary constraints

that diminish public trust and verifiability. These

constraints restrict the scalability, reduce the

participation rate, and prevent wide government and

corporate election adoption.

What is required is a decentralized, secure, and

natural e-voting platform to address these technical

and useability challenges, and that simultaneously

provides legal and regulatory compliance. A good

solution should provide end-to-end verifiability, be

immune to vote rigging or coercion, respect voter

privacy but give immediate visibility on the votes.

Tackling these fears is vital for the definition of a

digital voting system that can enable the democratic

process in the digital age.

3 LITERATURE SURVEY

As a result of the advancement of voting

technologies, there has been an increasing focus on

blockchain for the purpose of increasing transparency

and trust within elections. Some researchers have

investigated this fusion, and proposed different

architectural constructions to cope with it.

Chouhan and Sharma (2025) developed a

conceptual blockchain driven model for conducting

elections with focus on transparency and fairness.

Their measurements were not validated in practical

voting scenarios. Similarly, Russo et al. (2021)

proposed a secure blockchain voting framework

(Chirotonia) based on linkable ring signatures that

presented its potential to improve voter anonymity,

but it incurred performance overhead in the

scalability experiments.

A distributed voting system (FASTEN) has been

recently proposed by Damle, Gujar and Moti (2021),

thus it is system that uses smart contract,

consequently, the implementation for obligation

verification is based on Ethereum by considering that

Ethereum can ensure the security and the correctness.

Despite some novelty in their work, they did not quite

solve the issues of voter authentication and real-time

auditability. To address privacy issues, Kim et al.

(2021) combined homomorphic encryption with a

blockchain, but their system was too computation-

expensive to be applicable for large-scale

deployment.

A more global view was proposed by Huang et

al. (2024), who provided a thorough survey of e-

voting systems based on blockchains. They

determined that despite the potential of blockchain to

add trust and accountability, a lack of usability and

complex deployment models hamper its mainstream

adoption. Kiayias et al. (2024) elaborated on this

point by offering a theoretically sound framework to

ensure the integrity of the election but no empirical

nor adoption evidence for the framework.

Jadhav et al. (2025), utilized a case study of

transparent online voting but they have not used

decentralized identity systems for secure voter`s

authentication. On the other hand, Shahandashti and

Hao (2024) designed DRE-i, a verifiable end-to-end

voting protocol that made a substantial advancement

on voter verifiability, and still needed a trusted setup

phase. Benaloh (2024) stressed the importance of

public auditing procedures in election systems,

explaining that any electronic voting system must

allow for open verifiability to remain credible to all

election stakeholders.

Real-world platforms, such as Voatz and Polyas,

have piloted blockchain voting in practice. However,

Voatz (2025) has been attacked for not being open-

source and having green-box security, which

contradicts its transparency. Democracy Earth and

Horizon State 2025) have advanced blockchain-based

models for open governance, but such tools have not

been widely adopted, largely due to technical and

other regulatory barriers.

Behrens et al. (2022) studied LiquidFeedback as a

platform for decentralized decision-making, but it

does not provide cryptographic end-to-end security

targeted for governmental elections. Earlier, yet

formative systems such as Helios (Adida, 2008), Prêt

à Voter (Ryan, 2005) and Scantegrity (Chaum et al.,

2008), have paved the way for end-to-end verifiable

voting, however they predate blockchain, and would

A Scalable and Veriﬁable Blockchain-Based E-Voting Framework for Transparent, Secure and User-Centric Democratic Elections

487

need considerable redressing to satisfy modern

requirements.

Taken together, the literature shows a sound

theoretical basis of blockchain-based voting systems,

including long-standing problems with usability,

performance, voter privacy, and regulation. This

raises the question for a comprehensive approach

integrating decentralized technologies with user

appropriate design and legal readiness a gap this

paper tries to bridge.

4 METHODOLOGY

To produce a secure, transparent, and scalable

blockchain-oriented e-voting system a brick-by-brick

design approach was utilized that included

cryptographic assurance, decentralized identity

management, smart contract orchestration, and voter-

centric design. The system is developed on top of

Ethereum-compatible blockchain technology,

providing the immutability and transparency of vote

casting records, as well as ensuring the tamper-

resistant and verifiability Election process for all

participants.

Figure 1 gives the Workflow of

Proposed Blockchain Voting System.

Decentralized voter registration First, the

architecture starts with a decentralized way of

registering the voter, and utilises self-sovereign

identity (SSI) and blockchain DIDs. Such DIDs

enable every eligible voter to create an identity, and

to prove that they are eligible for voting, against a

government-approved identity provider, in a manner

that does not reveal private information. After

successful identity confirmation, a blinking voting

token is sent to the user’s DAOstack native

blockchain wallet, eligible individual making a

unique vote that is locked to the issuing DAO,

achieving anonymity through zero-knowledge

proofs (ZKPs). Table 1 gives the information about

Voter Authentication Mechanism vs Privacy

Preservation.

Table 1: Voter Authentication Mechanism Vs Privacy Preservation.

Authentication Method

Privacy

Level

Blockchain

Compatibility

Voter

Anonymity

Regulatory

Compliance

Centralized ID Lo

in Low Low No Mediu

National ID + OTP Mediu

Mediu

Partial High

Decentralized Identifier

(

DID

)

hHi

hYes Hi

Biometric-linked DID Hi

hHi

hYes Hi

The ballot is generated and deployed via smart

contracts. A customizable voting smart contract is

designed to generate dynamic ballots based on

election-specific parameters such as lists of

candidates, the duration of voting, permissions for

access, and so on. Those contracts guarantee that no

one is able to change, erase, or use a vote “twice”

when it is cast. The act of a voting is submitting a

encrypted preference (with public key) to smart

contract address. The confidentiality is guaranteed by

the encryption, whereas the authenticity of the vote

could be certified by a digital signature.

To achieve end-to-end verifiability the system

contains a public view over the transparent ledger

and a private user verification portal. A voter upon

casting their vote, is provided a cryptographic receipt

(in the form of a QR code or hash digest) which the

voter can independently use to verify whether their

votes have been included in the final set of counts,

without revealing any information about the content

of their votes. In addition, the backend adopts a

homomorphic tallying scheme such that the voting

results can be computed correctly and privately based

on the votes without learning any individual vote.

Table 2 gives the information about Smart Contract

Functions and Execution Roles.

All the interactions with blockchain are optimized

to lower the gas fee and ensure efficiency. This

includes off-chain vote solicitation and batching

using layer-2 rollups, which drastically reduce the

cost of blockchain interaction, but retain

cryptographic linkage to the main chain. Moreover,

because the system is designed with modular inter-

operability in mind, it can be extended with several

governmental or institutional digital identity systems.

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Table 2: Smart Contract Functions and Execution Roles.

Smart Contract

Name

Function Triggered By Role in Voting Process

BallotContract Deploys candidate list Admin/Election Authority Defines ballot structure

VoteContract Accepts encrypted votes Voter Secure vote casting

ReceiptContract Issues cryptographic receipts VoteContract Enables vote verification

TallyContract Aggregates encrypted votes System Schedule

Performs privacy-

reserving count

Figure 1: Workflow of Proposed Blockchain Voting

System.

A monitoring dashboard is also provided for real

time auditing and transparency that showcases live

progress of the vote count, smart contract activity and

the status of validators. They can also reach

anonymized logs of all votes, and smart contracts logs

of their execution from multiple blockchain

explorers, which provides trust and accountability

without revealing how voters vote.

Finally, to demonstrate the efficiency of the

scheme, simulation experiments were carried out

against different network loads, voter participation

ranges and attack methods (e.g., Sybil attacks, vote

replay attacks, and smart contract tampering). The

collected transaction latency, vote confirmation time,

system throughput, and audit traceability were

analysed to prove the robustness and scalability of

the proposed framework.

5 RESULT AND DISCUSSION

The proposed blockchain e-voting architecture was

thoroughly tested using experiments in controlled

settings utilizing both simulated elections as well as

live deployment on a private Ethereum network

simulating common election tests. The design was

evaluated in a laboratory in three main use cases:

small organization (local elections), mid-size

municipality (municipal elections), and large-scale

elections (national elections). Priority was given to

the quantification of system efficiency, voter privacy,

transaction correctness, throughput scalability, and

ease of use. Table 3 shows the System Performance

Metrics under Varying Loads.

Table 3: System Performance Metrics Under Varying

Loads.

Number

Voters

Average

Vote

Latenc

(

)

Gas Cost

per Vote

(

USD

)

Confirmatio

n Success

Rate

(

)

500 4.2 0.03 100

1,000 5.1 0.035 99.8

5,000 6.2 0.04 99.5

10,000 8.0 0.045 99.1

Figure 2: Transaction Latency vs Number of Voters.

In Figure 2, One of the most significant results

was the vote-processing latency greatly decreased

and the average confirmation time reached 6.2 sec per

A Scalable and Veriﬁable Blockchain-Based E-Voting Framework for Transparent, Secure and User-Centric Democratic Elections

489

in a network with 5,000 simulated voters. This was

achieved by adopting Layer-2 rollup techniques and

off-chain batching approaches, which helped in

overcoming the network congestion that is usually

seen during peak transaction times on public

blockchains. In this manner, the framework proved

to be capable of scaling without compromising the

cryptographic guarantees nor increasing cost per

transaction beyond the reasonable threshold.

Integrity and transparency of the system were

also tested through end-to-end audit simulations. By

testing against verifiable smart contracts and

immutable blockchain logs, election auditors could

obtain the entire voting history, and verify vote

counts with 0 size mismatch for 100% of test cases.

Voter-side technique of verification through receipt

and visual verification worked well with more than

94% of the voters were able to use the portal and

verify that their vote was included, demonstrating

good usability and trust enhancement. Figure 3 gives

the information about Security Resilience under

Attack Simulations. Table 4 shows the Security

Testing Outcomes under Simulated Attacks.

Table 4: Security Testing Outcomes Under Simulated Attacks.

Attack Type Simulation Outcome System Response

Data Integrity

Maintaine

Vote Replay Attac

Blocked by contract Rejected duplicate hash Yes

bil Attack Attem

t Failed at identit

sta

eDID-

ased authentication Yes

Contract Tampering Not executable Immutable contract rules Yes

Timestamp Forging Detected and ignored

Blockchain time

consensus

Yes

Figure 3: Security Resilience Under Attack Simulations.

For the privacy and security, the implementation

of zero knowledge proof techniques that preserved

voter’s anonymity while validating eligibility.

Adversarial testing did not record any successful

Sybil or double-voting attacks. In addition,

homomorphic tallies maintained the secrecy of

individual votes yet they allowed an accurate

computation of the final result without decrypting any

vote. Together, these qualities made the system an

ideal fit for high-stakes electoral arenas.

The contracts which controlled the lifecycle of

voting held up well to constant stress testing. Even

from a forced attack perspective – timestamp fudging,

contract injection attempts, the voting logic was

maintained perfectly fine given the predetermined

access checks and the unchangeable rules of the

contract. The average costs of gas per transaction

were 4 cents in real testnet simulation, presented how

affordable and efficient the model is for a national-

level deployment given that the model is backed by

a sustaining infrastructure.

In addition to technical results, a user experiment

was held with 60 users distributed over a wide range

of demographic background. Most users found the

system to be intuitive, particularly the mobile-

friendly voting interface that led them through the

steps of authenticating, selecting a ballot and

confirming their vote with minimal assistance.

Feedback obtained from post-vote questionnaires

stressed they move towards transparency and trust in

technology, which the system effectively achieved.

Table 5 gives the Usability Feedback from Voter

Testing.

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Table 5: Usability Feedback from Voter Testing.

Usability

Metric

Average

Rating

(

Out of 5

)

Positive

Feedback

(

)

Notes

Ease of

Registration

4.7 96%

DID process

easy to follow

Ballot

Navigation

4.6 94%

Clear

instructions

helped users

Verification

Process

4.5 91%

QR-based

receipts were

truste

Overall

Satisfaction

4.8 98%

Most users

preferred this

over manual

voting

Figure 4: Usability Feedback.

Figure 4 gives the usability feedback. Taken

together, the framework mitigated significant

drawbacks in related systems including

computational inefficiency, closed-source non-

transparency, and user estrangement. Its possible

application to different voting scales, combined with

being open source and fully auditable, puts it as a

promising real-world candidate. Marrying

cryptosystems with user-centric-design as well as

compliancy mechanisms, our proposed model

ensures that theoretical blockchain applications

don\u2019t operate in practice in a vacuum, and could

easily fit into a perception of electoral integrity.

Figure 5 gives the vote confirmation success rate.

Figure 5: Vote Confirmation Success Rate.

6 CONCLUSIONS

This study introduces a holistic scalable blockchain-

based e-voting frame work in response to the

sustainability related to the issues of integrity,

transparency, security and usability in democratic

electoral systems. By employing decentralized

identity management, lightweight cryptographic

protocols and end-to-end verifiability measures, our

scheme provides a tamper-resistant and verifiable

digital voting ecosystem. In contrast to current work,

this model forms a new connection between

theoretical robustness and actual deployment by

focussing on users' permission, legal compliance,

and modular adaptation.

Experimental results showed that the proposed

system achieves both low latency and high

throughput in a range of election contexts, with the

simultaneous added advantages of voter privacy and

protection from tampering or coercion. Voter-end

verificiation tooling and live audit dashboards builds

confidence in the system by the public raises trust

and participation in digital voting.

By focusing on the twin goals of technical

innovation and democratic inclusiveness, this

framework paves the way to modernizing elections to

be more secure and fair. It unlocks opportunities for

transparent governance, not just in government

elections, but also in corporations, schools, and in

decentralized communities that desire trust worthy

decision making tools.

Next steps will also consider large-scale pilots,

interoperability with national identity systems, and

expanding support for ranked-choice and multi-phase

voting, thereby increasing the impact and adoption

potential of the system in diverse democratic

contexts.

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