Bharat E-Vote: A Blockchain-Based Electronic Voting System with Commitment-Based Privacy and Multi-Layered Security

Traditional electronic voting systems rely on cen-tralized trust, lack independent verifiability, and offer limited ballot privacy. This paper presents Bharat E-Vote, a decen-tralized electronic voting platform built on Ethereum smart contracts with a hash-based commitment scheme for vote pri-vacy and a seven-layer defense-in-depth security architecture. Votes are recorded as immutable blockchain state transitions. A commitment scheme based on finite-field arithmetic hides voter choices, while a simplified proof-of-knowledge protocol provides a structural framework for on-chain verification (with limitations discussed in Section IV-B). The security architecture combines bot protection with rate limiting, OTP-based multi-factor authentication with httpOnly cookie-based JWT transport, keystroke dynamics anomaly detection, smart contract role-based access control, HTTP parameter pollution prevention, and HTTP security header enforcement. An ERC-2771 meta-transaction forwarder [12] enables gasless voting. The system was validated through 49 automated smart contract tests and 9 backend API integration tests (100% pass rate across 58 total tests). Performance benchmarks show vote inclusion in blocks within 12–18 seconds on Ethereum Sepolia testnet (with probabilistic finality at approximately 12 minutes), and API response times below 150ms. We present an honest assessment of the system’s limitations, including the proof-of-concept nature of the privacy module and the trust assumptions inherent in the architecture.