A Next-Generation E-Voting Framework Leveraging Smart Contracts and Privacy-Preserving Identity

Abstract

Electoral Democracy is the process of a democratic government, as it guarantees legitimacy and involvement of the populace. E-voting systems based on blockchains also can provide more transparency, security and auditability, but put a strain on performance and voter anonymity. To address this issue, in this paper a proposed method “A Next-Generation E-Voting Framework Leveraging Smart Contracts and Privacy-Preserving Identity-EVSPCP” is proposed. It includes smart contracts, differential privacy, and self-sovereign identity (SSI). Smart contracts are automated to carry out voting steps and enforce them, make them transparent, and tamperproof. Differential privacy defends the anonymity of voters by redistributing some number of recoverable votes probabilistically and statistically estimating the final results, while maintaining the overall accuracy. SSI is a simplified Web3 implementation, allowing decentralized and user-owned identities, with trusted and verifiable authentication. EVSPCP is also tested at different loads to various transaction loads, ballot volumes, and candidate counts and deployed on a permissioned blockchain with Hyperledger Besu across distributed Google Cloud nodes. The findings indicate decreasing transaction latency and good percent vote estimation accuracy, and vote reconstruction attacks are resistant.