ONLINE VOTING SYSTEM USING BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY TO ENHANCE DIGITAL DEMOCRACY

Abstract

To develop a blockchain-based online voting system that enhances security and accessibility by integrating two-factor authentication using Aadhaar-linked phone numbers for OTP verification during voting, our system places a strong emphasis on enhancing security and instilling trust in the electoral process. The users are required to capture their picture using the website's camera feature, providing an additional layer of security by verifying their physical presence during the voting process. This measure reinforces the integrity of each vote and helps prevent fraudulent activities, ensuring a more secure and transparent online voting experience. This pioneering solution addresses longstanding challenges in traditional voting systems, such as security vulnerabilities and low voter turnout. The user interface is meticulously crafted to be intuitive, encouraging inclusivity and building confidence in digital democracies. Recognizing common barriers to voter participation in India, such as distant polling stations, time constraints, health issues, and geographical, limitations, our project aims to maximize voter turnout by offering a comprehensive solution that removes these obstacles. Every vote is encrypted and recorded on the blockchain, guaranteeing transparency while streamlining procedures to facilitate broader civic engagement in a secure and efficient manner. This innovative approach paves the way for a more trusted and inclusive electoral system, empowering citizens to exercise their democratic rights confidently.

Specification

Voter recognition and privacy protection:
This field of invention focuses on developing secure methods for verifying voter identity while ensuring privacy and security. By utilizing decentralized and cryptographic technologies, it allows for the verification of voters without exposing personal information. Techniques such as multiple authentication factors which include know your customer (KYC) verification, face recognition and unique ID can be employed using cryptographic methods like zero-knowledge proofs. This approach ensures that voters can be authenticated without compromising their anonymity, enabling a system where each voter can cast a single vote while protecting their personal data.
Secure real-time vote counting and results: This field of invention enables block chain to streamline the vote counting process, ensuring that votes are counted accurately and efficiently, resulting in real-time election results. The decentralized nature of the system helps eliminate traditional delays, reduces human error, and prevents tampering, leading to a more transparent and reliable electoral process. By leveraging block chain technology, the integrity and speed of vote counting can be significantly enhanced, fostering greater public trust in election outcomes.
Remote Voting Solutions: This field focuses on removing barriers to voter participation by providing secure, remote voting solutions, such as blockchain-based platforms This initiative for voters, especially in locations free of distance or travel issues, be able to vote anywhere, promote wider democratic participation, improve access and ensure inclusion in the electoral process.
Block chain Technology: This field of invention relates to a secure online voting system using blockchain technology. This system stores voting records in a decentralized, immutable ledger, preventing tampering.
Blockchain's cryptographic security ensures that votes are encrypted and accessible only to authorized individuals, preserving voter privacy. The transparent ledger allows verification of the voting process, ensuring election integrity and providing an auditable mechanism for the entire voting procedure.
Biometric Authentication: This field of invention relates to biometric authentication in a blockchain-based online voting system. It uses facial and fingerprint recognition to verify voter identity, ensuring only eligible individuals caii vote. This biometric data is securely stored and matched with pre- registered records, enhancing the security and integrity of the voting process while preventing fraud and ensuring the system's transparency.
having two sets o f private and public keys, a voter management node, two smart contract modules, and a blockchain. A voter management node is configured to provide a cryptographic base for public key generation and to pre-register DIDs of vote nodes. A first smart contract module is configured to perform self-identification of vote nodes, encryption of votes, and generation of zero- knowledge proofs for the validity of their results, and to upload ail the outputs to a blockchain. For the purpose, a vote node executes the first smart contract module, taking a voting decision, an asserted DID, the two sets of public and private keys as inputs, where one set of keys is for the self-identification, and another set is for the encryption. A second smart contract module is configured to download the votes from the blockchain, check the validity of proofs, tally up the results without decrypting them, and finally upload the results to blockchain.
C N 111369730B: The invention teaches a method, system, and device for bid evaluation with blockchain. This process involves obtaining identity information for a target account and authenticating the same. Once authenticated, a bid application file is saved on a blockchain server.
After receipt of a request for review, the server transmits the file to a designated terminal,which allows a pre-review result to be created. The result of the last review in the final, winning bid is derived from the bid application file and the pre-reviewing. This procedure deters issues concerning fairness and efficiency in authentication by full verification o f identity.
These are the drawbacks we have observed in existing blockchain-based voting systems. Many current solutions struggle with ensuring complete voter privacy, preventing double voting, and securely storing sensitive data. Additionally, some methods rely on third-party verification, which undermines the decentralized nature of blockchain technology. Real-time vote counting and verification processes also tend to lack the efficiency needed for large-scale elections. To overcome these challenges, our solution leverages blockchain sharding for highly secure and confidential information storage, incorporates facial recognition algorithms to verify voter identity, and operates in a secure environment to safeguard voter data. Furthermore, our system offers voters the option to cast their votes either online or offline, with both methods interconnected to prevent duplicate voting, thus ensuring a seamless, secure, and transparent voting experience while maximizing voter participation.
OBJECTIVES
• To enhance user's experience by utilizing online voting where a user can achieve higher level security, privacy and trust can be done with prevention of false voting and unauthorized access by the user. • To handle high-level voters, an appropriate system should be developed. • To Implement a suitable mechanism to protect and voter's identity • To speed-up and declare voting results: The distributed nature of blockchain allows real-time counting of votes and reporting results, thereby making it fast and efficient. • To mitigate unauthorized access: Leverage blockchain's immutability on the voting records once recorded, thus ensuring integrity in election results. • To familiarize and Incorporate Webs based Voting Process: Ensures all election officials, voters, and stakeholders understand. • To build confidential elections: The block-based voting model ensures honest and integrity in elections. Each vote is recorded in a secure and transparent manner.
Therefore, fraud-tuned risk is reduced.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF DRAWING
Fig.l Block Diagram of the proposed system As depicted from the flowchart of this e-voting application, through biometric credentials and blockchain verification, users authenticate and vote securely. The authentication process commences when users log into the application using their Aadhaar number along with other biometric data that could be either a fingerprint or an eye scan. Once the biometric data is confirmed to be correct, then the system cross-checks if the user's credentials are valid, that includes age as well as Aadhaar, through mining nodes. If verified, then allow the user to vote; else give them access denied. Now, if a vote is cast, it is done; otherwise, it simply halts if a verification fails.
Fig.2 An Ethereum platform for casting vote The e-voting application enhances electoral security through a structured authentication process, combining biometric verification and blockchain technology. By ensuring that only legitimate, verified users can cast votes, the system aims to build trust and facilitate broader participation in the democratic process. The image depicts a blockchain platform, specifically Ethereum, designed for secure and transparent voting during elections. Participants can log in using unique credentials, allowing them to cast their votes for different parties. The platform provides real-time results by displaying the vote counts, ensuring transparency in the electoral process. To prevent fraudulent voting, the system blocks the unique ID generated during user login once a vote is cast, ensuring that each voter can only participate once. This approach enhances the integrity of the voting process while promoting confidence in the election outcomes.
Fig.3 Login and the voter details page of the website The image gives a representation of a frontend interface that represents an online voting system with the use of blockchain technology. From the image, there are login fields wherein voters have access to the platform securely and confidentially by means of username and password, further passwords for recovery asiwell as the option for voter registration. Upon successful login, a form is displayed wherein users will put in details like voter name, voter ID, marital status, and father's name. This section thus becomes highly important for the KYC verification process where user details are cross­checked with Aadhaar databases in order to identify actual candidates and avoid voting fraud. In this regard, blockchain technology ensures that once it has sent verification data, all voter information gets safely stored and not alterable, ensuring clarity and trust throughout the process of voting. This system rejects unauthorized access and records each individual vote in a decentralized manner, thereby upholding election integrity.
Fig.4 Location selection and personal details of voter This is the next step in the e-voting process, which consists of Select Location as follows. Here, the drop-down menus are used to select the state, district, and ward by the voter so that his/her voting region could be identified precisely. In this form, all the details entered by the voter in the previous step, including his/her name, gender, address, Aadhaar number, and phone number, are automatically filled in. This ensures that there is a smooth process by which location-based information ties in with that of the voter's identity in achieving a more personalized and

effective voting process. The system thereby fetches and displays the data safely while reducing errors and improving the general use experience, ensuring that all information is verified before being used at voting stations.
Fig.5 Parties selection and completion of voting This is the final stage where voters can safely give their votes. The voles will be stored in blocks of blockchain and cannot be altered without the consent of all authorized administrators in the election committee because of the nature of blockchain technology; changing them becomes almost impossible. On our website, you can get updates in real time on voting trends, which party leads in which region, offering a holistic and transparent view of the electoral process.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION
Existing System
At present-, the online voting systems used all the time are based on a more or less centralized architecture which poses a risk of many security issues, for example, unauthorized access, data alteration or counterfeiting. Strategies to protect the identification users like One- time passwords Service helps, but also calls onto social engineering and sim card swapping tricks therefore exposing the system to impersonation attacks. What's more, centralized database systems are opaque and their use is subjected to the singularity thereby making them less resistant to attack, for example, DDoS or even alteration of the database. Due to the unavailability of end-to-end encryption and permanent storage records of data, such as ballot papers, even vote cast is at the risk of being tampered with.
Such deficiencies do not guarantee on-repudiation and verifiability thus creating opportunities for the sabotaging of the voter's credentials as well as the registration of candidates. In order to solve these issues, it is compulsory to use a different way of thinking which is provided through adaptation of a distributed system and in particular the blockchain technology that employs smart contracts and advanced cryptography with a secure ledger to improve identification and security as wellas increase transparency.
Solution of the proposed system KYC Verification:
For securing the identity of the voter, it has a strong Know Your Customer (KYC) process and on registration will require further personal information that will be checked with government databases like Aadhar. At successful authentication, the system generates and sends an OTP to the Aadhar- linked phone number of the voter. Since the OTP is documented on the blockchain, it makes sure that voters with valid documents in their identity are granted access to the system. With use of KYC verification, it's evident that only people whose identities with authentic documents can access and interact with the system with minimal chances of identity fraud, unauthorized voting, or likely registration entries.

Blockchain Technology The core of this online voting system is the blockchain technology. It ensures security, transparency, and integrity in votes. All votes will be encrypted and recorded as immutable records such that once they are submitted, they can't be tampered with or altered. Smart contracts eliminate some bureaucracy processes or requests within the voting process by automating functions for voter registration and vote counting, among other activities. Furthermore, the distributed property of blockchain eliminates the existence of a single point of failure, and therefore lowers the risk of hacking or manipulation. To improve the scalability, sharding is provided in such a system. Sharding will divide the network into smaller, manageable parts. Each shard will process a subset of the voting data, hence the system is able to process large amounts of voters without any issues of performance. However, care must be taken for secure communication to be ensured between shards as well as to thwart shard takeover attacks, thus preserving the security and trustworthiness of the system.
Face Detection and Recognition .In^.ddi.l.iQn._t_o_OTP, this system offers a biometric authentication layer, facilitated by facial recognition. When a voter goes to cast the ballot, he or she will be compulsorily captured live through the camera of his or her device. This is cross-checked with the biometric detail in his or her Aadhar profile for identification through facial recognition or fingerprint, thus attesting to his or her physical presence while casting the ballot. The added biometric step means that no unauthorized individual will vote in someone else's name, hence an added layer of fraud prevention and confidence building in the genuineness of each vote.

Safe User Environment This system is using secured kiosk mode to ensure that the voting environment is non- interference and tamper-proof. These modes ensure that voters cannot switch to another tab. cannot close the application window, or anything else without a process that could influence them directly when voting from public stations or sharing devices. Kiosk mode diminishes the risks of interference from the outside as its unauthorized access or interrupting would be totally prevented and therefore turn out to be an assured protection of the integrity of the voting process. This is especially useful in making public voting stations due to the fact that voters might easily be influenced or distracted by technical matters while inside the voting booth.
User Interface
Good user interface is also critical to an effective voting system since the access is intuitive. A wide range of users can easily navigate the system from the least techno-friendly voter to the high-tek voter. The interface will be simple and streamlined yet highly secure. Compatibility in device use, such as smart phones, tablets, and desktops, will ensure that a voter can participate using their preferred platform. It also encompasses simple instructions and guidelines that make voting simple and friendly even to a first-time voter. The same feature enhances friendliness, which influences more participants in the voting process and fosters trust with the digital voting system.

Further, the online voting system will include real-time updates on voting trends and patterns, showcasing leading regions and voter turnout statistics directly on the website. To ensure scalability, the system will initially be launched for state-level elections, such as Chief Minister elections, with plans to expand its implementation to national elections, including those for the Prime Minister, as the system proves its effectiveness. Additionally, candidate registration will adhere to the norms established by the Election Commission of India, employing a more secure and streamlined process to bolster the integrity and trustworthiness of the electoral system following the successful deployment of this voting framework.


An online voting system using blockchain comprising a session management approach utilizing user authentication and authorization to allow for unique user sessions, while the implementation of blockchain would enhance security and transparency in vote storage.
I) An online voting system using blockchain of claim l employs sharding to pursue an improvement in scalability based on the separate pieces ofthe blockchain known as shards. A number of these shards process transactions in parallel to increase throughput, and a fixed number of them create a block. Therefore, instead of the entire blockchain stream being alerted, this mechanism employing sharding allows for the use of a specific mechanism for targeted notifications within the shard to update blocks automatically.
2) An online voting system using blockchain of claim I or 2, further comprising the immutability o f blockchain to ensure that once votes are recorded, they cannot be altered or deleted, providing a robust defense against false voting and fraud. Each vote is stored in a block linked to ■pr.e,vio_us_blocks through cryptographic hashes, creating a permanent and transparent record that is nearly impossible for malicious actors to manipulate. Any attempt to change a vote would require altering all subsequent blocks, which is computationally infeasible due to the decentralized nature ofblockchain. This inherent immutability builds trust in the voting process, ensuring that each vote remains secure and verifiable.
3) An online voting system that utilizes blockchain incorporates KYC verification alongside OCR technology to confirm the authenticity of voters and simplify the on boarding process. OCR technology extracts essential details like name, date of birth, and address from identity documents, transforming them into machine- readable text for rapid verification. This approach boosts security, minimizes the risk of fraud, and accelerates voter registration, ultimately making the voting process more efficient and user-friendly while upholding rigorous identity verification standards.
4) An online voting system employs biometric methods like fingerprint and facial recognition to securely verify the identity of voters. Fingerprint recognition utilizes unique friction ridge patterns, whereas facial recognition matches a live image against a stored photo for authentication. These biometric technologies improve security by accurately confirming each voter's identity, thereby preventing unauthorized access and fraud.
5) In the facial recognition process for online voting of claim 5, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) identifies essential features from images, which are subsequently analyzed by the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm for identification purposes. The CNN is trained to delect significant facial trails, maintaining high accuracy even under difficult conditions like changing lighting and different poses. This approach enables quick image processing, making it effective for real-time voter identification.


) This online voting system through blockchain of claim I, increases the integrity of votes in the electoral processes while being transparent and secured. Efforts should ensure a smooth user interface for the system, possibly developed with React and CSS. Better user experience and convenience should be determined while developing the design. It should be user friendly with a simple layout that would enable easy voting in a comprehensible navigation menu which shouldn't confuse voters. Additionally, immediate feedback in the form of confirmation messages after a vote has been submitted assures users that votes are being captured correctly, hence giving confidence to them about the voting process.
7) An online voting system using blockchain where false voting is prevented by blocking the voter's ID once they have cast their vote. This system supports both online and offline, voting, ensuring that once a vote is cast online, the voter's ID is blocked from being used again, thus preventing duplicate votes. Similarly, if a vote is cast offline, access to online voting is also restricted for that voter ID, effectively preventing unauthorized voting and ensuring a secure and trustworthy process.
8) An online voting system using blockchain employs a technique called kiosk mode, which restricts. users fiom. navigating .away from the voting app^ir accessing jjnauthorized settings.
This ensures a secure voting environ men Fby prevent in'g~users~fro m- rnod fyiiig- devicc-set ti ngsr switching to other applications, or opening additional tabs.

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