Paper 2026/565

Zeeperio: Verifying Governmental Elections with Ethereum

Aleksander Essex, Western University

Jeremy Clark, Concordia University

Abstract

Scantegrity II became the first governmental election run with a cryptographic end-to-end election verification (E2E-V) protocol. E2E-V protocols allow the public to verify proofs that the election was executed correctly, but participation in this important process is largely left as an opt-in, ad hoc exercise. We present Zeeperio, a special purpose zk-SNARK argument (built with application-specific arithmetization) that can issue proofs for Scantegrity elections that can be verified automatically via smart contracts for inexpensive on-chain verification. A Zeeperio verification contract running on Ethereum costs under $30 USD (at time of writing) per election (and the cost is constant in the number of ballots). By not relying on general purpose zk-SNARK toolkits, like circuit or zkVM compilers, Zeeperio's tailor-made argument offers multiple order-of-magnitude improvements to prover efficiency over implementations from the research literature. For example, Zeeperio requires under 5 hours on a commodity laptop for an election with 100,000 ballots to produce a proof in the kilobyte range.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/565,
      author = {Aikamdeep Malhotra and Aleksander Essex and Jeremy Clark},
      title = {Zeeperio: Verifying Governmental Elections with Ethereum},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/565},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/565}
}