SmartphoneDemocracy: Privacy-Preserving E-Voting on Decentralized Infrastructure using Novel European Identity

TL;DR

This paper presents SmartphoneDemocracy, a secure, privacy-preserving e-voting system on smartphones utilizing European Digital Identity, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and blockchain to ensure trustworthiness, privacy, and decentralization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel protocol combining European Digital Identity, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and blockchain for secure, private, and decentralized smartphone-based e-voting.

Findings

Feasible performance for medium- to large-scale elections

Enhanced voter privacy and security

Decentralized, trust-minimized architecture

Abstract

The digitization of democratic processes promises greater accessibility but presents challenges in terms of security, privacy, and verifiability. Existing electronic voting systems often rely on centralized architectures, creating single points of failure and forcing too much trust in authorities, which contradicts democratic principles. This research addresses the challenge of creating a secure, private e-voting system with minimized trust dependencies designed for the most versatile personal device: the smartphone. We introduce SmartphoneDemocracy, a novel e-voting protocol that combines three key technologies: the emerging European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet for Sybil-resistant identity verification, Zero-Knowledge Proofs for privacy-preserving validation, and a peer-to-peer blockchain (TrustChain) for a resilient, serverless public bulletin board. Our protocol enables voters to register and cast ballots anonymously and verifiably directly from their smartphones. We provide a detailed protocol design, a security analysis against a defined threat model, and a performance evaluation demonstrating that the computational and network overhead is feasible for medium- to large-scale elections. By developing and prototyping this system, we demonstrate a viable path to empower citizens with a trustworthy, accessible, and user-controlled digital voting experience.