Authors: Kaustubh Nitin Salunke, Vinayak Amol Shewale, Anurag Sanjay Shigwan, Omkar Vinod Tate, Ms. Tejal Panmand
Abstract: Voting systems are the foundation of democratic decision-making, ensuring fair participation, representation, and legitimacy in elections. Traditional paper-based voting systems, although widely used, suffer from multiple limitations such as high operational costs, excessive manpower requirements, time-consuming vote counting, delayed result declaration, and vulnerability to fraudulent practices like ballot stuffing, impersonation, and vote tampering. These issues become more significant in large-scale or frequently conducted elections, including institutional and organizational elections. Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) were introduced to address some of these challenges by improving efficiency and reducing manual errors. However, EVMs still operate in centralized environments, raising concerns related to transparency, verifiability, and trust. The lack of public audit mechanisms and dependence on election authorities for result validation often leads to skepticism among voters. Blockchain technology has emerged as a revolutionary solution capable of transforming traditional systems through decentralization, immutability, cryptographic security, and transparency. By maintaining a distributed and tamper-proof ledger, blockchain ensures that once a vote is recorded, it cannot be altered or deleted without network consensus. This survey paper presents the NEXTGEN VOTING SYSTEM, a blockchain-based online voting platform designed primarily for institutional elections such as college student council elections. The paper surveys existing voting technologies, analyzes their strengths and limitations, identifies research gaps, and proposes a secure, transparent, and scalable blockchain-based voting framework. The proposed system aims to enhance voter trust, ensure end-to- end verifiability, reduce election costs, and improve accessibility while maintaining voter privacy and ballot secrecy.
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Published by: vikaspatanker