Next-Gen Secure E-Voting through Aadhaar-based Decentralized ID with zk-SNARKs and Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract

Safe and transparent e-voting is becoming more and more important in modern democracies, as the confidence of citizens in electoral systems is determined by the issues of trust, privacy and scalability. Existing e-voting systems, however, have privacy, impersonation vulnerability, lack of transparency, and coercive weaknesses, and so they must be improved through cryptographic and identity solutions. In an attempt to provide security at these points, to propose a voting system that uses Aadhaar-linked decentralized identities together with iris scan biometrics to authenticate voters, zk-SNARKs to produce zero-knowledge proofs of voter eligibility without revealing their personal data, and homomorphic encryption to ensure ballot confidentiality and allow vote counting to be verifiably processed. Moreover, coercion resistance is ensured by a revoting mechanism, as only the last authenticated vote is included in the counting, thereby mitigating external pressure or vote-buying. The results demonstrate that the proposed design is capable to concurrently deliver strong authentication, biometric-based impersonation resistance, privacy preservation, end-to-end verifiability, and scalability in e-voting. In general, this framework eliminates major weaknesses of the old systems in addition to increasing voter confidence and integrity of the elections. The integration of decentralized identity, biometric iris recognition, and modern cryptography allows the model to provide a secure, transparent, and non-coercible framework of next-generation democratization procedures in India and can present an open-source, globally replicable solution with large-scale elections.