Software Engineering Framework for Designing, Implementing, and Validating Secure Blockchain-Based Electronic Voting Systems

Abstract

Electronic voting systems are promised to be faster and have less operational overhead, but most implementations remain characterized by centralization, low auditability and user-paid transaction fees and lack of privacy. The software engineering framework to design, implement and validate a secure blockchain-based e-voting system that will overcome these practical constraints is presented in this paper. The system combines identity-based voter registration, guaranteed by smart contracts, election management, gasless voting route, and a privacy-conscious architecture that includes a direction of zero-knowledge proofs to cast confidential votes. It was tested on the Polygon Amoy test network with Solidity smart contracts, a wallet registry linked to a NIC, and a workflow voter and administrator web application. The analysis consisted of gas benchmarking, contract optimization as well as a usability test with 50 participants. Findings indicate that optimized election creation reduced average gas consumption from 726,422 to 653,344 and the paymaster path increased total gas per vote to 156897 per vote although this left the user with no gas cost. The results of usability suggest the overall moderate acceptance with the mean scores of 3.16 to 3.40 in understanding, easy to use, trust, and satisfaction, and worse results among those with zero blockchain familiarity. It demonstrates that gasless voting enhances access and that a systematic engineering system can inform the creation of secure and usable blockchain e-voting systems, and full production-quality zero-knowledge verification is also a task of the future.