Designing the Future: A Blockchain-Based Framework for Transparent and Secure Elections

Abstract

Blockchain-based electronic voting systems have been identified as a solution to enhance the transparency, security, and efficiency of modern electoral processes. However, the existing system has three major problems, which include scalability, privacy issues, and cybersecurity attacks. The researcher proposed an innovative solution to develop an electronic voting system with enhanced security, scalability, and transparency of voters' information. This paper introduced the Hybrid Cryptographic and Enforced Blockchain (HCE VoteChain) framework, which combines Hyperledger Fabric with various sophisticated forms of cryptography, including SHA256 hashing, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES256) encryption, Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and digital signatures, Paillier Homomorphic Encryption, and Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) auditing. The experimental evaluation demonstrated that the system achieved a throughput of 288 Transactions Per Second (TPS) while maintaining an average latency of 2.521 seconds, a transaction speed of 0.13 votes per second, and a data immutability score of 0.999 and security resilience of 10000 and fault tolerance of 0.96, which proved its high reliability and robustness across different operational conditions. The results indicate that the framework suggested is a big step up in terms of security, scalability, and transparency over the existing solutions. Besides, it does not compromise the voter's privacy and auditability. The innovation of this work is the combination of multi-layer cryptographic mechanisms with the permission blockchain architecture to not only come up with a balanced compromise between performance and security but also to make the system capable of handling large-scale real-world digital elections.