A Novel Blockchain-Based Secure Voting System with End-to-End Verifiability and Privacy

Current electronic voting infrastructure continues to be plagued by security, transparency and voter privacy concerns, in both large and remote elections. In order to cope with these issues, this paper introduces a blockchain-based voting system which fulfills end-to-end verifiability and maintains ballot secrecy. The system proposed uses a permissioned blockchain system along with Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol to guarantee data integrity and resilience to faults when facing partially adversarial conditions. The combination of homomorphic encryption of tallying encrypted votes and zero-knowledge proofs of voter eligibility and validation of ballots, without disclosing the content of the vote, results in vote confidentiality and auditability. Smart contracts facilitate the process of vote validation and aggregation making it publically auditable without trusting third parties. Simulated workload performance evaluation suggests that, under regular operating conditions, the system has a verification accuracy greater than 98 % and has an average processing time and computational overhead that are lower than those of the corresponding blockchain-based voting systems under realistic operating conditions. The given framework is planned to assist with the real-time auditing and ensure privacy assurances. Besides this, the paper also addresses the practicability of post-quantum cryptographic primitives and cross-chain mechanisms as further improvements to ensure enhancement of long-term security and scalability.