A Solana-based decentralized e-voting system: Design, Implementation, and Case Study at TASFUED

Abstract

Centralized electronic voting setups are vulnerable to administrative tampering and database exploits, while decentralized legacy blockchain alternatives suffer from severe transaction limits and high latency under load. To solve these scaling bottlenecks, we designed and deployed Solana-Vote, a decentralized electronic voting platform designed to leverage Solana's Proof of History consensus. The architecture decouples off-chain identity verification from on-chain state changes using Rust-based Anchor smart contracts and a React front-end. We empirically validated the system during a student union election pilot study at Tai Solarin University of Education (TASUED), where a cohort of 870 active student participants successfully tested and evaluated the platform. Performance metrics captured throughout the pilot show a highly stable transaction confirmation window of 320 ms to 360 ms, processing speeds of 15,000 transactions per second under heavy traffic, and an average execution cost under ₦2 (0.00001 SOL) per ballot. Client-side Curve25519 ElGamal encryption combined with non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs successfully protected voter privacy and blocked double-voting. Furthermore, post-election usability surveys yielded a high System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 84.7, with over 90% of participating students expressing greater overall trust in this decentralized framework over previous centralized options. Our findings demonstrate that Solana-based voting mechanisms offer a secure, highly scalable, and user-validated blueprint for digital electoral reforms.