Electwithme: A Secure-Balloting, Coercion-Resistant, Scalable, And Optimized E-Voting System Using Blockchain Technology

In every democracy, voting is an essential and fundamental activity. The wrong candidate may be chosen to lead the nation if this process is botched or doesn't go as planned. Traditional voting systems have many loopholes where voting turnout becomes very low. For several reasons, individuals prefer not to wait in extensive lines on election day or to have to travel through hilly or terrorist-prone areas. The blockchain-based online voting system can significantly address all voting challenges to make the election process more comfortable and secure, which needs to be considered in designing a robust system. This paper presents a novel approach to building a safe and robust e-voting system using the two-layered EVM machine called zkEVM (Zero Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) and a newly designed and optimized smart contract. The proposed architecture is made to reduce the total gas cost of the smart contract while offering security, coercion resistance, reliability, anonymity, authenticity with OTP validation, and receipt-freeness. The suggested smart contract gas cost is lowered by up to 11% compared to earlier works. The system smart contract is also analyzed with different blockchain testnets and provides a graphical representation. Nearly all of the e-voting requirements are met by the suggested system, and a comparative study is also given in the latter part of the paper.