A Blockchain-Powered E-Voting System That Preserves Privacy with Homomorphic Tallying and Zero-Trust Authentication

Abstract

This paper introduces a Zero-Trust, provably secure electronic voting protocol that overcomes the long-standing trilemma of security, privacy, and end-toend verifiability by combining advanced cryptographic mechanisms with multimodal biometric authentication. Electronic voting promises improved accessibility and efficiency, yet traditional systems depend heavily on centralized trusted authorities, leaving them vulnerable to insider threats, coercion, and large-scale manipulation. To eliminate such vulnerabilities, the proposed framework employs deep-learning-based facial and fingerprint recognition with liveness detection to prevent identity spoofing at the edge. Voter privacy and coercion resistance are ensured through a Nullifiable Commitment Scheme integrated with Paillier Homomorphic Encryption, enabling vote tallying directly over encrypted ballots without exposing vote contents. Additionally, the system introduces a novel Homomorphic Encrypted Anomaly Detection (HE-AD) module capable of identifying malicious traffic patterns on ciphertext features with an accuracy of 98.2%, thereby enabling real-time threat monitoring without compromising confidentiality. All encrypted ballots, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), and audit logs are recorded on a permissioned blockchain to guarantee Verifiability of Cast as Intended and Recorded as Cast. Experimental results confirm that the system achieves an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 0.85% in biometric verification and maintains an average transaction latency below 2.5 seconds, demonstrating its feasibility for national-scale elections in high-assurance environments.