Vote Chain: A Decentralized Commit–Reveal Voting Framework Using Ethereum Smart Contracts and Cryptographic Hash Verification

Abstract

Vote Chain is a fully implemented, decentralized e-voting application (DApp) built on Ethereum. Existing blockchain-based voting systems often suffer from either high computational overhead due to homomorphic encryption or lack of fully deployable, adversarially tested implementations. To address these limitations, VoteChain employs a keccak256-based commit–reveal protocol to preserve ballot secrecy during the voting phase, with Solidity 0.8.20 smart contracts enforcing all election rules autonomously. Wallet-based authentication via MetaMask eliminates centralized identity management. The system is validated through 14 automated unit tests (all passing in 615 ms) covering correctness, access control, double-voting, hash forgery, and phase-bypass attacks. Per-voter gas cost is approximately 120,000 units (commit and reveal combined). An ablation study confirms the non-redundant contribution of each architectural component. Comparative analysis shows that VoteChain achieves vote privacy without homomorphic encryption while maintaining full decentralization and implementation completeness. The system is evaluated and validated on a local Hardhat network, with the architecture readily extensible to Layer-2 rollups for large-scale elections.