Paper 2025/1022 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1022 ↗

Burn Your Vote: Decentralized and Publicly Verifiable Anonymous Voting at Scale

Abstract

Secure and trustworthy electronic voting requires more than correctness and censorship resistance, it must also ensure voter privacy, vote confidentiality, and protection against coercion. Prior work attempts to address these challenges using heavyweight cryptographic primitives such as homomorphic encryption, time-lock puzzles, or multi-party computation. These approaches often involve complex computations, depend on trusted parties, and typically do not scale well. We propose a lightweight, fully on-chain anonymous voting protocol based on a novel application of the proof-of-burn mechanism in the context of voting. Voters anonymously commit to their votes by burning tokens to pseudorandom addresses and later submit zero-knowledge proofs attesting to their valid participation. Our design achieves vote integrity, coercion resistance, and unlinkability without relying on ballot encryption, trusted parties, or centralized tallying. The tallying process is public and operates on plaintext votes that are authenticated yet unlinkable to voters. This enables support of flexible voting models, including token-weighted and quadratic voting, with minimal on-chain overhead. We formally analyze the protocol's security guarantees and demonstrate support for a broad range of voting models. We implement the protocol as an open-source library fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and evaluate it on commodity hardware (a consumer-grade laptop). All phases of the voting process are executed on the Sepolia testnet. Experimental results confirm the protocol's scalability and improved on-chain efficiency, achieving over 20% reduction in gas consumption compared to the state of the art.