A Cost-efficient and Scalable Framework for E-Voting System based on Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

The importance of democratic voting systems in any nation has increased the mistrust of conventional voting methods. Other digital voting methods have been challenged due to a lack of transparency, security, rigging and scalability. Blockchain (BC) is a decentralized, distributed ledger technology for recording and keeping safe transactions. Unfortunately, BC implementation in large-scale elections is still being challenged because the amount of information in the Electronic Voting (EV) system increased, and storage space and processing costs are also growing. Moreover, existing BC technologies have scaling problems. Off-chain (OC) and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) solutions, among others, have been suggested to alleviate the scaling problem. Throughput and latency are crucial performance metrics for a BC system. Sharding is a viable option for addressing BC's scalability and performance issues. Therefore, this paper proposes a model to shard the current BC to scale the main chain to achieve performance securely. The proposed system is distributed using Ethereum and works as an OC that is in sync with the district-level databases, updated the main-chin periodically by authorities, and is faster in terms of cost-effectiveness, scalability and data storage. Some limitations are involved, such as the authorities should be trusted to avoid malicious attacks.