An Investigation of Scalability for Blockchain-Based E-Voting Applications.

In the last years, a number of initiatives have developed and deployed new electronic voting (e-voting) systems, with the goal of improving the paper-based electoral systems. Traditional e-voting systems are vulnerable to manipulation concerns, such as altering election outcomes, due to their centralized nature. Blockchain is a decentralized system technology with a distributed ledger in which every participant in the network accesses the same data source. The immutability of blockchains makes them suited for e-voting systems as no one can alter data. Although blockchain technology has potential for e-voting systems, there are challenges, including the scalability for large-scale elections. We present a solution to scalability of e-voting systems using the Solana blockchain. Solana provides a fast and scalable blockchain infrastructure utilizing the Proof of History (PoH) consensus algorithm, making it easier for developers to create efficient decentralized applications. The evaluation of factors such as throughput, delay, and cost shows that a Solana implementation can finalize a vote 32 times faster than Ethereum 2.0, with a significantly lower cost per vote. The throughput of e-voting app on Solana indicates that it can deal with a large scale election entirely.