Paper 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 attempt 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 (PoB) mechanism. 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 encrypted ballots, trusted third parties, or centralized tallying. The tallying process is public and operates on plaintext votes that are authenticated yet unlinkable to voters. This enables 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 (EVM), and our experimental evaluation confirms its high scalability and improved efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art.