ADEVA: A Decentralized Electronic Voting Application Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

<div>Abstract—Despite the various advantages inherent in the use of blockchain technology, blockchain application platforms are characterized by bottlenecks, latency, energy inefficiency, time inefficiency, low transaction throughput, vulnerability to 51% attacks, and a lack of fairness in the sharing of mining proceeds. These challenges are currently affecting the performance of this technology, hindering its rapid development and adoption for real-time applications such as Electronic Voting Applications (EVAs). It is well known that the consensus mechanism responsible for the security and consistency features of a blockchain, is also responsible for most of the above challenges.</div><div>In this paper, a new consensus mechanism, Proof of Vote (PoV) is proposed, a lightweight consensus mechanism specifically adapted for EVA, as a replacement for the heavyweight Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm. We use the Ethereum blockchain as a decentralized application platform, in which we develop a decentralized electronic voting application (ADEVA), replacing the Ethereum PoW consensus algorithm with the proposed PoV consensus algorithm. Thus we implemented ADEVA with PoV and compared it to the two major consensus mechanisms: Proof of work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). We found that PoV enhanced the performance of ADEVA over and above that achieved using PoW and PoS. The low resource utilization and high transaction throughput of ADEVA with PoV makes it a scalable solution for real-world EVAs.</div>