Implementation of Decentralized Electronic Polling System Using Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

Elections have been the subject of the perpetual altercation, desegregation and reassertion of authority among different leaders at various levels from ages. This process of an election may range from selection of ward counsellor to member of parliament and from a boardroom meeting election to polling your opinion in a survey. The election is a sophisticated process which has grown with the advancements in the technology to practices in politics. In centralized architectures, the results of polling activities have often questioned and spotted differently through methods of electors. Blockchain as an incipient advancement in technology has shown many possibilities in various domains such as financial sector & digital assets, digital identity & security, pharmaceuticals and health, insurance sector, supply chain management, election etc. In this paper, we rendered the fundamental features of the Blockchain technology like distributed-ledger, decentralized, irreversible, consensus mechanism, transparent etc. to develop an electronic polling system for the present democratic ecosystem. The proposed electronic voting system is formulated using Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Smart contracts and Web3.js along with software dependencies like NPM, Truffle framework, Metamask and Ganache to replicate the Blockchain environment. Use cases were employed for identification of the roles of the voters based on Ethereum account types. Enumeration of various stages of the election has been performed through phases like pre-polling activities, casting of vote and counting of votes. The proposed system was found to fulfil the requisites of an eVoting arrangement such as transparency, secrecy, quantifiability, security, integrity, precision, scrutiny etc.