Optimizing Gas Fees for Cost-Effective E-voting Smart Contracts on the Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

E-voting utilizing blockchain technology is an emerging solution that has the potential to transform the electoral process due to its features like anonymity, privacy protection, and non-repudiation. Integrating voting applications into smart contracts on the blockchain introduces a computational expense known as gas. This research paper focuses on presenting methodologies to reduce gas fees associated with contract deployment and execution. The experimentation is conducted using Ethereum blockchain and Solidity smart contract, with Remix IDE serving as the testing environment. Our proposed solution includes a simplified voting contract facilitating candidate registration, vote storage, and preventing multiple votes from the same user. The findings demonstrate an overall reduction of 19.18% in deployment costs and 0.95% for single vote execution costs notably, as the number of transactions increases. the overall impact of these optimizations is anticipated to produce a much greater reduction in gas fees for single transactions. These results offer insights into optimizing gas fees in e-voting applications, enhancing the viability and efficiency of blockchain-driven voting systems.