A Cost-Efficient Proof-of-Stake-Voting Based Auditable Blockchain e-Voting System

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, blockchain-based systems have emerged powerfully and led to the development of several new and improved applications in terms of increased security, trust, accountability and reliability. One important trust-based application is electronic voting system which still lacks in providing good throughput while also reducing the costs in voting given the deployment of state-of-the-art technologies. So, there is a need to imply an efficient consensus protocol to impart cost-efficiency as well as better performance of a blockchain-based electronic voting system. This paper focuses on boosting up the cost-efficiency in the voting process, while also being auditable, thus, strengthening the trust of voters on the government and lessening the overall costs incurred in voting. In this paper, Proof-of-Stake-Voting is used as consensus protocol which is observed to give a throughput of 4-5K transactions per second. Then its performance is compared with the other existing consensus protocols such as Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Authority in terms of gas consumption, gas cost, and throughput. It has been shown through the results that there is a significant difference in the total gas cost, with Proof-of-Stake-Voting protocol consuming 3.1 x 10 −7 Ethers (ETH), as compared to the Proof-of-Work, taking 5.42536 x 10 −4 ETH and Proof-of-Authority protocols taking 2.49759 x 10 −4 ETH.