Can Zero-Trust E-Voting Systems Fix India's Broken Democracy?
Every election season in India, we see the same circus. Money changing hands, allegations flying around about tampered voter lists, political parties screaming about EVMs being hacked, and then the Election Commission stepping in to say everything's fine. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court keeps upholding the integrity of these machines. So what's actually happening here?
The problem with Indian elections runs deeper than just technical vulnerabilities. We're dealing with a system where trust has completely broken down. When companies under investigation by enforcement agencies suddenly donate hundreds of crores through electoral bonds, when voter lists mysteriously expand by over 1.46 lakh in a single constituency while others barely add 60,000, and when cash seizures hit record levels every election cycle, you know something's fundamentally wrong.
The Trust Problem Nobody Talks About
Most people focus on whether EVMs can be hacked. That's missing the point entirely. The real issue is that our current voting system requires you to trust multiple parties at every step. You trust the Election Commission. You trust the political parties. You trust the companies manufacturing the machines. You trust the officials handling them.
When Aurobindo Pharma gave 250 million rupees through electoral bonds just months after their promoter turned state witness in a corruption case, that trust falls apart. When opposition parties present data showing over 100,000 fraudulent voters in a single constituency and the Election Commission dismisses it, that trust crumbles further.
The Supreme Court struck down the Electoral Bond Scheme in February 2024, calling it unconstitutional. The data dump that followed revealed exactly what critics had been saying all along: companies reeling from investigations were funneling millions of dollars to parties in power. Some call it legalized corruption. Others prefer "selective transparency." Either way, 56% of all political funding in India was flowing through this opaque system.
What Zero-Trust Actually Means
Zero-trust architecture for voting systems comes from cryptographic research that's been ongoing for years. The technical paper I've been studying (published at IEEE's 2020 Computer Security Foundations Symposium) presents a solution using Non-Interactive Witness-Indistinguishable (NIWI) proofs. Before your eyes glaze over at the jargon, here's what matters.
Traditional e-voting systems work like this: an authority (Election Commission, in our case) generates encryption keys. Voters cast encrypted ballots. The authority decrypts them and counts the votes. You have to trust that the authority doesn't peek at individual votes and that they count correctly. Most "secure" systems try to fix this by splitting trust among multiple authorities, hoping not all of them are corrupt.
Zero-trust systems flip this entirely. They mathematically guarantee that a corrupt authority cannot fake the tally without being detected with 100% certainty. Not 99%. Not 99.9%. Literally perfect verifiability. Anyone can verify the results without trusting anyone.
How The Cryptography Works
The system uses three parallel encryption layers. When you vote, your ballot gets encrypted three times with different keys. Here's the clever part: the system proves that all three encryptions contain the same vote without revealing what that vote is. When counting, two of the three encrypted votes are used. The third acts as a backup proof.
Why three layers? Because of how witness-indistinguishable proofs work. Unlike traditional zero-knowledge proofs that require trusted setup parameters (which defeats the whole point in a zero-trust context), NIWI proofs need multiple valid "witnesses" to prove the same statement. The three encryptions provide these witnesses.
The ballot verification works through a public bulletin board where all encrypted votes are posted. Anyone can run the verification algorithm. If the Election Commission tries to claim the vote count is different from what the encrypted ballots actually contain, the proof fails. They get caught, mathematically, every single time.
For privacy, the system relies on the Decision Linear (DLIN) assumption, which is well-studied and considered secure. But privacy requires an honest authority. Verifiability doesn't. Even if every authority is corrupt, they cannot fake results without detection. That's the asymmetry that makes this powerful.
The Multiple Authority Model
The research extends to multiple authorities, which fits perfectly with India's federal structure. Instead of trusting the central Election Commission alone, you could have state-level authorities, district-level authorities, or even independent watchdog organizations all participating.
Each authority generates their own encryption keys. A voter's ballot gets split into shares across all authorities using polynomial secret sharing. The sum of shares equals the actual vote, but no single authority can learn anything from their share alone. To fake a result, every single authority would need to collude, and even then, the cryptographic proofs would expose them.
The beauty of this design: authorities don't need to interact with each other at all. No coordination required. No sequential processing. Each authority independently computes their portion of the tally, publishes a proof of correctness, and the final result combines all their outputs. Anyone can verify each authority's work independently.
Where India Currently Stands
The Election Commission filed FIRs against people making EVM tampering claims in 2024, calling them "false, baseless and unsubstantiated". The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld EVM integrity. But public trust keeps eroding because the transparency just isn't there.
Recent controversies show the pattern clearly. In August 2025, opposition parties in Thrissur, Kerala claimed unusual voter registration patterns, with 1.46 lakh voters added between 2019 and 2024 compared to just 63,000-78,000 in comparable constituencies. They filed multiple complaints with the District Election Officer. No action was taken.
Rahul Gandhi launched a 16-day, 1,300 km march across Bihar in August 2025 specifically to protest what he calls "vote chori" (vote theft). He presented Election Commission data claiming over 100,000 fraudulent voters in a single Karnataka constituency. The Congress party even created a dedicated portal to gather public support for their allegations.
Whether these specific allegations are true doesn't matter as much as what they represent: a complete breakdown of trust in the electoral process. When major political parties are organizing massive rallies and marches against the Election Commission itself, your voting system has a legitimacy crisis.
Why Current Solutions Don't Work
The Election Commission's standard response involves conducting mock polls on questioned EVMs. But as advocates pointed out in February 2025 Supreme Court hearings, the SOP for checking tampering actually clears the EVM's data first, then runs a test vote. If the test works, they declare the machine was fine all along. That's not verification—that's circular reasoning.
The Supreme Court directed the ECI to file an affidavit explaining the rationale behind this SOP, noting that the 2024 judgment intended for engineers to check actual tampering, not conduct mock polls on reset machines. The case got scheduled for March 2025 hearings.
Adding VVPATs (Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails) helped somewhat, but only provides a partial solution. You can verify that your vote was recorded as cast, but you still have to trust that the counting process is honest. Without end-to-end verifiability, voters cannot independently verify that their vote was actually included in the final tally.
Implementation Roadmap For India
Getting from where we are to a zero-trust system won't happen overnight. The technical infrastructure exists. The cryptographic foundations are solid. What's missing is political will and public understanding.
Phase One should focus on building public bulletin boards for all election data. Not just results, but encrypted ballots, cryptographic proofs, verification tools. Make everything publicly auditable. This doesn't require replacing EVMs immediately—it's about transparency first.
Phase Two involves deploying pilot zero-trust systems in municipal or panchayat elections. Start small. Build confidence. Let people see how universal verifiability works in practice. Let independent researchers and opposition parties run verification checks. Show that the math works.
Phase Three scales to state and national elections once the system proves itself. The open-source nature means anyone can audit the code. Any mathematician can verify the cryptographic proofs. Any concerned citizen can check that their vote was counted correctly.
The research paper provides efficient instantiations specifically for referendum-style yes/no votes, which could work well for Indian elections using the First Past The Post system. The computational overhead is manageable with modern infrastructure.
The Electoral Bonds Parallel
Zero-trust e-voting solves for voting integrity what removing electoral bonds solved for funding transparency. Before February 2024, companies could anonymously funnel money to political parties through the State Bank of India. Critics called it "legalized corruption" allowing corporate influence over policy decisions.
After the Supreme Court struck it down, the data dump revealed the extent of the problem. One analysis found that firms under enforcement investigations donated heavily, then got relief. The Supreme Court called the scheme unconstitutional specifically because it violated transparency requirements fundamental to democracy
Zero-trust voting applies the same principle to ballot integrity. Instead of trusting authorities to count honestly (the voting equivalent of anonymous bonds), mathematical proofs guarantee correctness. Instead of selective transparency controlled by the State Bank, universal verifiability lets anyone check the results.
Both reforms address the same core issue: in a democracy, trust must come from transparency and verifiability, not from institutional authority. When institutions become compromised, mathematical guarantees become essential.
Technical Challenges And Solutions
The biggest technical hurdle is ballot independence—preventing vote replay attacks where the same encrypted ballot gets cast multiple times. The research paper acknowledges this limitation in the NIWI setting but notes it's easily solved by adding proofs of knowledge of the plaintext to each ballot.
For Indian elections with 900+ million voters, scalability matters. The verification cost scales linearly with voter count using standard approaches. The paper suggests using succinct arguments to achieve sub-linear verification costs, though this introduces computational assumptions rather than perfect verifiability.
Receipt-freeness—preventing voters from proving how they voted to potential vote buyers—creates tension with perfect verifiability. Some models handle this through re-randomization servers that maintain privacy without compromising verifiability. Given India's persistent vote-buying problems (election authorities seized record amounts of cash and bribes in 2024), this requires careful design.
Eligibility verification (proving voters are authorized) can be handled through PKI and digital signatures, though this relies on computational assumptions. An alternative uses private trusted setup for eligibility checks while maintaining perfect verifiability for tally correctness.
Why The Government Should Care
When Rahul Gandhi filed complaints with detailed data about fraudulent voters and the Election Commission's response was essentially "trust us, it's fine," that's a sign the current system has failed. Even if the EC is completely honest (which opposition parties dispute), the lack of verifiable proof makes defending their integrity impossible.
Zero-trust systems provide that proof. When anyone can independently verify the tally is correct, allegations of manipulation become mathematically disprovable. The Election Commission wouldn't need to file FIRs against people making tampering claims—they could just point to the cryptographic proofs showing the results are correct.
This benefits everyone. The ruling party can't be accused of rigging elections when the math proves they won fairly. Opposition parties can't claim fraud when they can independently verify every step. Voters gain confidence that their vote actually counted. International observers get objective evidence of electoral integrity.
Countries around the world are watching India's democratic processes. When the world's largest democracy faces credibility questions about its elections, that's a geopolitical problem. Estonia has used internet voting with cryptographic verification since 2005. Switzerland runs pilots with verifiable systems. India should lead, not follow, in democratic innovation.
The Open Source Imperative
Any zero-trust voting system for India must be fully open source. Not just the code, but the cryptographic specifications, the verification tools, everything. This isn't negotiable.
The research paper's constructions can be implemented using just bilinear groups with the Decision Linear assumption. These are well-studied cryptographic primitives with multiple open-source implementations. The Groth-Sahai proofs mentioned for efficient instantiation have been implemented and audited by cryptographers worldwide.
Making the system open source enables global expert review. Indian researchers, international cryptographers, opposition parties, civil society organizations—everyone can audit the implementation. When Estonia launched e-voting, transparency and source code access were key to building trust.
Open source also prevents vendor lock-in. With current EVMs, we rely on specific manufacturers with proprietary systems. Open implementations let multiple organizations build compatible systems, fostering competition and reducing single points of failure.
What Individuals Can Actually Do
Understanding cryptographic proofs requires mathematical background most voters don't have. But using verification tools doesn't. Think of it like HTTPS on websites—you don't need to understand elliptic curve cryptography to know the green padlock means the connection is secure.
Verification interfaces can be designed for non-technical users. Scan a QR code from your ballot receipt. Enter it into a public portal or mobile app. See confirmation that your encrypted vote is on the public bulletin board and was included in the tally. The underlying math works whether or not you understand it.
Civil society organizations and opposition parties would likely run their own verification nodes, providing independent tallies anyone can cross-check. Media organizations could integrate verification into election coverage. The more parties independently verify, the stronger the system becomes.
For the technically inclined, the research paper provides complete specifications and security proofs. Anyone with cryptography background can verify the mathematics. Open source implementations let programmers audit the code. This distributed verification is how zero-trust systems build confidence.
Beyond Just Fixing Elections
The cryptographic techniques in zero-trust voting have broader applications. The paper mentions key escrow, fair exchange, verifiable secret sharing, group signatures, and confirmer signatures.
For India specifically, these techniques could apply to other areas where corruption and trust breakdown cause problems: public procurement (where contract allocation shows clear political interference patterns), subsidy distribution, land records, or any system where verifiable correctness matters more than trusted authorities.
The same mathematical frameworks that prove election tallies are correct can prove government contracts were awarded fairly, that subsidy beneficiaries met eligibility criteria, or that land transactions followed proper procedures. Zero-trust architecture isn't just for voting—it's for governance.
Think about how electoral bonds worked: anonymous donations flowing through a government bank, with only the ruling party knowing who donated. Then think about government contracts going to companies that happened to make large electoral bond donations. Zero-trust systems with public verifiability make these patterns obvious, if not impossible.
The Political Obstacle
Here's the uncomfortable truth: no political party currently in power benefits from perfect electoral transparency. When you're winning elections, why would you implement a system that makes fraud mathematically impossible?
The Supreme Court's electoral bond judgment came after years of civil society pressure. The implementation of zero-trust voting will likely follow the same pattern: sustained public demand forcing reluctant political action.
Opposition parties support electoral reforms when they're losing. Ruling parties support reforms when they're worried about losing. The window for actual change opens when enough citizens demand it regardless of which party benefits.
International pressure might help. If India wants to position itself as a democratic counterweight to authoritarian regimes globally, having cryptographically verifiable elections provides objective proof. The current system's credibility problems (deserved or not) undermine India's soft power.
What Happens If We Do Nothing
The trajectory is clear. Every election cycle brings more allegations, more distrust, more conflict. The Election Commission's authority erodes. Political parties file more FIRs against critics. Marches and protests intensify. International observers question the process. The system's legitimacy slowly collapses.
Eventually, the ruling party changes (democracies are unpredictable that way). The new ruling party faces the same allegations from the new opposition. The cycle repeats. Trust never rebuilds because the structural problems remain unfixed.
Alternatively, one party entrenches power so thoroughly through electoral manipulation that India's democracy becomes formally multi-party but functionally single-party. The term "electoral autocracy" gets used more frequently. We become another case study in democratic backsliding.
Zero-trust e-voting isn't a magic solution to all of India's electoral problems. It doesn't prevent vote-buying (that requires separate interventions). It doesn't fix voter suppression. It doesn't address media manipulation or disinformation.
But it solves the fundamental counting problem: making sure that votes cast are votes counted, and proving it mathematically to anyone who cares to check. That's the foundation everything else must build on.
Moving Forward
The research exists. The cryptography works. The implementations are feasible. What India needs now is political leadership willing to implement zero-trust systems and civil society pressure demanding it.
Start by demanding that the Election Commission publish all election data on public bulletin boards. Not summaries. Not selected statistics. Everything. Every encrypted ballot. Every verification proof. Make it downloadable. Let anyone run independent analysis.
Push for pilot programs in local elections. Municipal corporations. Panchayats. Places where stakes are lower but learning is possible. Show that universal verifiability works in practice, not just theory.
Support organizations like the Association for Democratic Reforms pushing for electoral transparency. The same group that filed the original electoral bonds case is now challenging the Election Commission's VVPAT procedures. These fights matter.
Most importantly, demand that any new voting system be fully open source with published security proofs. No proprietary systems. No trust us because we're experts. Trust but verify has failed. Time for verify without trust.
But there's something worse brewing beneath the surface. The electoral bonds scheme that got struck down by the Supreme Court in February 2024 revealed a sophisticated corruption network where companies under investigation would donate millions to ruling parties, only to mysteriously have their cases go quiet. The data dump from State Bank of India showed that 56% of all political funding in India came through these anonymous bonds, creating what transparency activists call "legalized corruption".
The Real Problem Nobody Talks About
Most people focus on EVMs getting hacked or tampered with. The Election Commission keeps insisting EVMs are tamper-proof, the Supreme Court keeps backing them up, and conspiracy theorists keep making viral videos about "frequency isolation" that get them FIRs filed against them. This whole debate misses the point.
The actual vulnerability in India's voting system has nothing to do with the machines themselves. When a company like Aurobindo Pharma donates 250 million rupees to political parties while their executives are turning state witnesses in corruption cases, that's not an EVM problem. When 41% of surveyed voters admit that cash and gifts are "an important factor" in deciding their vote, that's not a technical glitch. When parties can receive unlimited anonymous donations through electoral bonds and the government-controlled State Bank of India holds all the donor data, that's a trust problem at the system level.
India doesn't need better voting machines. India needs a voting system where trust itself is mathematically impossible to exploit.
What Zero-Trust Actually Means
Here's where it gets interesting. Computer scientists have been working on something called zero-trust e-voting protocols. The research paper on Non-Interactive Witness-Indistinguishable (NIWI) proofs presents a system where you don't have to trust anyone, not the election authority, not the voting machine manufacturer, not the government, nobody.
Think about how current systems work. Every e-voting protocol used anywhere in the world relies on some trusted party. Either you trust the election commission to count votes honestly, or you trust a set of authorities where corruption needs to compromise all of them simultaneously, or you trust that nobody backdoored the random number generator in your cryptographic system. That's like building a house where the foundation depends on people being honest. It works until it doesn't.
Zero-trust systems flip this completely. They use mathematical proofs that anyone can verify, without needing to trust that the people running the system are honest. The specific protocol in the research uses something called Non-Interactive Witness-Indistinguishable proofs, which is a mouthful, but essentially means you can prove something is correct without revealing how you know it's correct, and more importantly, without needing any trusted setup.
How The Technical Magic Works
Traditional voting systems that claim to be "verifiable" use Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge proofs (NIZK). These require either a Common Reference String generated by a trusted party, or they assume a perfect random function exists that everyone can access, the Random Oracle model. Both assumptions are problems. The trusted party generating the CRS could be corrupt. The "secure" hash function could have been designed maliciously. Even the Random Oracle methodology has been proven mathematically unsound.
The zero-trust protocol avoids these issues entirely by using NIWI proofs instead. Here's the clever part: the system uses three parallel instances of public-key encryption. When someone casts a vote, their ballot contains three encrypted copies and a proof that either all three encrypt the same valid vote, or that a specific commitment in the public key equals zero. This "or" statement is what makes the magic work.
To count votes, the authority decrypts two of the three ciphertexts and proves the tally is correct using those two. But because there are three ciphertexts and multiple ways to prove correctness, the system has what cryptographers call "multiple witnesses." This engineering of multiple witnesses is what allows NIWI proofs to provide both privacy and verifiability without any trust assumptions.
The verifiability is perfect, meaning a fake tally is detected with probability 1, and this holds unconditionally without requiring any trusted parties or computational assumptions. Privacy requires only the Decision Linear assumption, which is well-studied and falsifiable, unlike the sketchy assumptions some cryptographic protocols depend on.
What This Would Mean For Indian Elections
Imagine an election system built on this protocol. When Aurobindo Pharma's executives are under investigation and suddenly donate 250 million rupees, the transparent tallying process would make any attempt to manipulate vote counts mathematically impossible. The verification doesn't depend on trusting the Election Commission. Any third party, including opposition parties, civil society organizations, or independent auditors, could verify the tally themselves using the publicly available proofs.
The electoral bonds problem would become irrelevant. Sure, parties could still receive anonymous donations, but those donations couldn't buy altered vote counts. The Supreme Court struck down electoral bonds for violating voters' right to information about funding sources. But even if such schemes existed, zero-trust voting would create an impenetrable barrier between money and vote manipulation.
The direct voter bribery problem, where parties distribute cash and alcohol to influence individual votes, that stays. No cryptographic protocol can stop someone from accepting money and then voting however they want in private. But it would eliminate the systemic corruption where parties buy off election authorities or manipulate tallying processes. A study found that a radio campaign highlighting the costs of vote buying drew close to 3 million votes away from vote-buying parties, showing that voters can be persuaded against corruption when given information. Zero-trust voting would provide the ultimate information: mathematical proof that votes are counted correctly.
The Implementation Reality Check
Now for the part where I'm honest about the limitations. The research paper's general construction that supports any tally function would be prohibitively expensive to run at India's scale. Computing everything as Boolean circuits means the system would work but be practically unusable for elections with hundreds of millions of voters.
However, the paper includes an efficient instantiation specifically for binary votes using Groth-Sahai proofs. This works for referendum-style yes/no questions. For candidate elections, you'd need adaptations. The paper also outlines a multi-authority version where tally evaluation is distributed among several authorities, and privacy holds if at least one authority is honest. No interaction between authorities is required, which is practically significant.
The system requires a trusted public bulletin board (PBB) for universal verifiability, where anyone can verify the tally. Without the trusted PBB, you get individual verifiability, where each voter can confirm their vote was counted, but third-party verification becomes harder. India already maintains election result websites and databases, so adapting existing infrastructure for a PBB is technically feasible.
The bigger implementation challenge is political, not technical. The same establishment that benefits from the current system's vulnerabilities would need to approve moving to zero-trust protocols. When the Supreme Court ordered the Election Commission to implement stronger vote verification through VVPATs, the ECI's standard operating procedure was designed such that checking an EVM for tampering would clear the data first, then run a mock poll. That's not verification, that's theater. Getting real zero-trust systems deployed would face similar resistance.
Where This Could Actually Start
If you wanted to pilot zero-trust e-voting in India, starting small makes sense. Municipal elections in a single city. Student union elections at major universities. Cooperative society elections. Places where the stakes are lower but the credibility problems are just as real.
The research paper was published in 2020 at the IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium. It's been five years. The cryptographic primitives needed, NIWI proof systems and public-key encryption schemes with perfect correctness, exist and can be instantiated using bilinear groups under the Decision Linear assumption. Open-source implementations could be developed using existing cryptographic libraries.
What's missing is the political will and institutional buy-in. The Election Commission dismissed Congress party's EVM tampering allegations as "baseless" in October 2024. They filed FIRs against people making false claims about hacking EVMs. But they've also stopped publishing daily lists of bribery seizures, which they used to do in 2019. The transparency around election integrity seems to be going backwards, not forwards.
The Bigger Picture
India's democracy faces an interesting contradiction. The world's largest democracy has voting systems that work well enough to conduct elections for 900+ million eligible voters. But the trust in those systems is eroding. When 41% of voters say bribes influence their decisions, when billions in anonymous donations flow to ruling parties, when companies under investigation donate and then get cleared, people notice.
Zero-trust cryptographic voting systems offer something rare in politics: a technical solution to a social problem that might actually work. Not because technology fixes human corruption, but because it removes the points where corruption can operate. You can still bribe voters. You can still use government agencies to shake down companies for donations. But you cannot manipulate the vote count without getting caught, not with probability 99%, but with probability 100%.
The protocol's perfect verifiability means that corrupt authorities trying to fake the tally will always be detected. That's not a political promise. That's a mathematical theorem.
For readers interested in the deep technical details, the full research paper titled "E-Voting Without Trust Assumptions Using Non-Interactive Witness-Indistinguishable Proofs" by Iovino and Rial is available through IEEE. For those tracking India's electoral integrity issues, the Supreme Court judgments on electoral bonds and EVM challenges provide essential background.
The question isn't whether zero-trust voting systems are technically possible. They are, and the math has been proven. The question is whether India's political establishment wants election systems that are actually impossible to manipulate. Based on how electoral bonds worked for seven years before the Supreme Court intervened, I'm not optimistic. But the technology exists. The research is published. The door is open.
Someone just needs to walk through it. As an Indian Techie, it's both possible, and our responsibility to contribute towards a more righteous system rather than sitting back to complain. What's your idea?
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