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Decentralized E-Voting Portal Using Blockchain
Kriti Patidar
Department of Electronics
SVVV
Indore, India
kriti.ekta@gmail.com
Abstract-Online voting is an alternative to age old paper
ballot system and the currently popular electronic voting
machines (EVM). An electronic voting portal should offer
security and integrity along with the transparency of votes
and privacy of voters. This paper proposes an e-voting system
based on blockchain that eliminates some of the limitations in
existing voting systems. The paper also presents state of art of
some blockchain frameworks for e-voting. The presented
implementation is suitable for small scale elections like inside
corporate houses, board rooms etc. The implementation uses
smart contract from Ethereum. Truffle framework is used in
this paper for development, testing and deploying smart
contracts. Ganache is used as Ethereum client for testing.
Here Meta-mask is used as browser wallet.
Keywords—Blockchain, Smart Contracts, Electronic voting,
Privacy, Ethereum.
I. INTRODUCTION
This paper discusses a completely decentralized and
open, online voting system based on blockchain.
Blockchain is a decentralized peer-to-peer network (P2P).
Aim of using blockchain is to remove centralized control
and mediators from the process. Blockchain is being studied
and research are going on to apply this disruptive
technology to different domains other than the financial
sector such as Internet of Things [1], medical or healthcare,
e-voting, logistics, e-commerce, real-estate, security and
privacy [2].
The idea behind an e-voting system based on blockchain
is similar to digital wallets. The system or authority can
issue a digital wallet to each participant after verifying its
identity. The wallet issued must contain the user credentials
and a single coin representing a single chance to vote [3].
When a user selects a candidate and casts its vote, the coin
in the user’s wallet is transferred to candidate’s account or
wallet. At the end the number of coins in each candidate’s
wallet represents the number of votes cast to him.
Electronic and online voting system can provide more
security and integrity than EVM [4]. It also provides
privacy to the users; as the eligible voters can cast their
votes using their computers or even smartphones, thus
maintaining anonymity. It also builds trust on the system as
it is online and completely an open system. It can also
increase the number of participants’ involvement.
Blockchain eliminates the need of a central server to
manage network and a centralized database thus ensuring
trust. It is a complete decentralized open ledger system. The
10th ICCCNT 2019
July 6-8, 2019, IIT - Kanpur,
Kanpur, India
Dr. Swapnil Jain
Department of Electronics
SVVV
Indore, India
swapniljain76@gmail.com
public ledger records all the votes casted and is permanent
and immutable. It ensures that no vote can be changed once
casted. If someone tries to manipulate the ledger, they need
to first hack all previous blocks before adding new block,
which is nearly impossible because of consensus
mechanism. To comprise the network hacker should
compromise at least one-third or sometimes half of the
network depending on the consensus employed [5]. This
paper further discusses some blockchain based e-voting
system implementations, its challenges and benefits.
II. MOTIVATION FOR BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
Traditionally, the database is maintained by a central
authority or a single organization that has then complete
control of the database. It has the ability to tamper with the
database and manipulate the data. Usually the authority
maintaining the database is the same that has created it and
will be using it. In such cases the organization has no
motive of manipulating or falsifying its own data. But in
other cases involving financial matters or sensitive data like
voting, it’s not wise to give total control of database to a
single authority or organization.
Even if the organization is guaranteed as to not make
any fraudulent changes to the database, it is easier for
hackers to manipulate a central database. To avoid such
situations, blockchain makes the database public, so that
anyone can store an individual copy of database that can
always be compared to check for manipulations. However,
the individual copies must always be updated to maintain
consistency. To maintain a consistent decentralized
database, blockchain utilizes consensus mechanism.
III. RELATED WORK
This section presents some state-of-the-art of e-voting
systems that uses blockchain. Reviewing the literature
shows that blockchain based solutions have been proposed
for voting in organizations, communities and states.
In 2014, in Russia, the city of Moscow’s Active Citizen
program was launched [6]. Many polls had been conducted
since then on diverse subjects like what should be the colour
of seats in a new sports arena, etc [7]. In 2017, in South
Korea a smart contract based blockchain enabled voting
system was used [8]. All the important data like votes and
results was stored on a blockchain. There was no
involvement of any central authority or management in the
process.
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In 2007, Estonia became the first country to allow use of
online voting system. In 2015 parliamentary elections 30%
of votes were casted through e-voting system [9]. Estonia
uses the national ID card of citizens for identity verification.
These cards contain the identify information in encrypted
manner. This system allows the Estonian citizens to perform
many tasks online such as online banking services, access
information on government portals and e-voting. For voting,
the citizens can enter their card into a card reader for
verification. After verification the voter gets access to the
voting website on the connected computer. After verifying
user credentials, a voter has access to the site for four days.
In these four days user can cast its vote and can even change
it several times. After submitting the vote, it passes through
forwarding server and stored in a server in encrypted form.
After the online voting period is completed, these votes are
transferred to a counting server which is disconnected from
network. This server is responsible for counting the votes
and giving the results. However, this e-voting system has
some potential risks. There may be malware on client side
machines that monitors and manipulates the vote casted.
Estonia government also plans to use blockchain for other
applications such as online patient monitoring systems and
maintain electronic health records.
In 2018, Agora which is Swiss blockchain startup
developed a blockchain based voting sytem. It was partially
tested in 2018 Sierra Leone’s general elections [10]. Agora
is a complete end-to-end verifiable blockchain. It is
designed to provide an online voting system to corporate,
governments and institutions. This blockchain based e-
voting system provides a token system, where the
institutions or the government purchases tokens for eligible
voters.
There are some other projects going on for blockchain
based e-voting system implementation from many
organizations such as Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange,
FollowMyVote, TIVI, Blockchain Voting Machine [11]
etc.
In 2017, McCorry et. al. proposed a Boardroom Voting
with Maximum Voter Privacy [12]. It utilizes smart contract
to provide self-tallying voting protocol. This blockchain
based decentralized Open Vote Network (OVN) is built
upon Ethereum.
In 2018, Jonathan et. al. proposed Netvote [13], a
decentralized blockchain based voting system. It is based on
Ethereum network and uses decentralized apps (dapps) for
user interface. Three dapps are proposed by the authors.
One is the Admin dapp, which is for management to set
policies and rules etc. Another dapp is Voter dapp used by
individual users to register and vote. And then the Tally
dapp is used to tally and declare election results. However,
this system is based on private blockchain.
IV. IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS OF BLOCKCHAIN BASED E-
VOTING
This section discusses the design considerations for
implementing an electronic voting system based on
blockchain. Later, an overview of Ethereum and smart
contract technology is presented.
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Kanpur, India
A. Design considerations
Following points are important and should be
considered while implementing e-voting system:
x The e-voting system should verify the identity of
voters and authenticate only eligible voters.
x The e-voting system should not allow access to
invalid candidates.
x Any voter should get only a single chance to vote i.e.
system should prevent double voting.
x It should provide complete privacy to voters and the
votes should not be traceable.
x It should not allow tampering with the votes casted
by anyone.
x The system should not allow single authority control
on counting.
B. Ethereum
Blockchains can be classified into two categories:
permission-ed and permission-less. Permission-ed
blockchains are private blockchain network with restrictions
on participation. Permission-less blockchains are public in
nature. In public blockchains there are no restrictions such
that anyone can read or write on blockchain ledger database.
Ethereum is a public decentralized blockchain network.
Basically, Ethereum is platform that allows
programmers to build decentralized applications using
blockchain technology. It is a permission-less blockchain
network. This section describes the types of accounts used
in Ethereum. Ethereum has two account types:
x External Accounts
x Contract Accounts
An externally owned account is a user controlled
account. It represents an external agent of network like
users, miners etc. These accounts are regulated with a
public-private key cryptography like RSA algorithms.
Mainly external accounts are used by users as a means to
interact with the Ethereum blockchain.
A contract account is a smart contract which is a
collection of code that regulates blockchain. These are
stored at a specific address, hence considered as accounts.
Contract accounts are always either invoked by some
external accounts or by other contract accounts. These
contracts are written in high level scripting languages such
as Solidity and Serpent.
Both of these accounts can store Ether. Ether is the
crypto currency of Ethereum, denoted by “ETH” in crypto
currency exchanges. It is used for transactions fee and
services in the Ethereum network. These are used to pay
Gas or transactions done. Gas is an intermediary token used
to make payment for computational work done for
executing a smart contract or for some transactions. Gas can
be purchased using Ether.
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C. Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are self executable code written inside
blockchains. These are similar to conventional business
contracts that are used for code of conduct agreement
between two parties. The smart contracts execute
automatically when the defined conditions are met. Smart
contracts help to carry out agreements and transactions in a
trusted manner among the untrusted or unknown parties
without the requirement of central authority.
Smart contracts are written using Solidity language. It is
an object-oriented language, and its syntax are similar to
JavaScript or Python. Smart contracts have several benefits
over conventional contracts like cost saving, and improved
efficiency. Smart contracts are popular as they are easily
verifiable by all users and ensure trust among parties.
D. Working of Blockchain Voting System
Registration process of voters and candidates is to be
done in advance. Identity verification should be done before
creating accounts. After identity verification, authorized
person should authenticate eligible users by proving a coin
or token [14]. Using this coin or token each user can vote
only once. Blockchain’s verification process will ensure that
double spending of this token is not possible. So any user
cannot vote multiple times. The e-voting system based on
blockchain is decentralized. There is no central authority to
conduct the elections.
Fig. 1. Voting process
E. Implementation in Ethereum
The e-voting decentralized application, or dApp, is built
on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum smart contract is
written in Solidity for casting votes. A client-side user
interface is built to use Ethereum accounts to cast votes.
Truffle Framework is used in this implementation to test the
smart contracts and deploy them to the blockchain. Truffle
framework facilitates to develop, test and deploy
decentralized applications. It provides a development
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environment for blockchain network. Truffle development
framework can be used to build smart contracts, compile
built-in contracts; link and deploy those contracts.
Ganache is part of Truffle ecosystem. It provides a
private blockchain for Ethereum development. It can be
seen as an Ethereum client. It can be used to test the
decentralized application built on truffle. It can be used to
deploy contracts while developing decentralized
applications. It also facilitates to run tests on blockchain and
smart contracts. Once the application is tested on ganache, it
can be deployed on Ethereum client like Geth. Ganache
provides a local and virtual blockchain for testing. It
provides ten external user accounts. Each account in
Ganache has been assigned a unique Ethereum address and
a private key associated with it. All the accounts come pre-
loaded with 100 ‘fake’ ethers.
Ganache comes in two versions, CLI and UI. This
implementation has used UI version for simplicity. Running
ganache is similar to running an Ethereum node. It is like a
virtual node. Ganache can be connected with wallets for
transactions. For this implementation, Meta-mask is used.
Meta-mask is a chrome extension, which connects to
Ethereum nodes and reads user wallets. Meta-mask uses
RPC to connect with Ethereum nodes.
Migrations are used to update the blockchain whenever
a smart contract is deployed. For each smart contract we
need to create a migration which is a numbered java script
file. Truffle framework automatically calls these files
sequentially. The smart contract is associated in the
migration file as following:
var TempContract = artifacts.require("./TempContract.sol");
module.exports = function(installer) {
installer.deploy(TempContract);
};
Fig. 2. Screenshot of the voting portal welcome screen

Fig. 3. Screenshot of the metamask confirmation notification when a
voter casts vote
Fig. 4. Screenshot of the election result after user casts votes and
confirms the vote
V. BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES
Blockchain based e-voting system provides following
benefits:
x Votes are cryptographically secured.
x Votes once stored are immutable and tamper-proof.
x It preserves voter’s privacy and anonymity.
x E-voting system may improve active
participation.
x It may improve the efficiency and allow faster
results.
x It promotes transparency and clarity to the system.
x It eliminates ambiguities arising from wrong/unclear
choices made on paper ballots.
x Voting results are publically auditable.
However, blockchain systems are complex in nature
which may hinder its wide acceptability. For e-voting
systems continuous broadband access is another concern.
Another issue can be the digital user skills. For large
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number of users’ authentication and validation, blockchain
requires much energy. So using blockchain based voting
system for national e-voting require more research on its
consensus.
VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This paper presents a blockchain based e-voting system
that runs on Ethereum. It shows that blockchain technology
can overcome limitations of centralized voting systems.
This implementation uses Ethereum blockchain as a
network as well as database for storing voter’s accounts,
candidate details and votes. This implementation makes use
of smart contracts. This implementation is tested on virtual
client. In future it can be tested on Ethereum test net with
large number of accounts. In future work, the feasibility of
blockchain based e-voting system for large-scale election
should be analyzed.
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