Permissioned Smart Contract Based e-Voting System for University

Abstract

The traditional e-voting systems face a lot of challenges like unauthorized access to the data and there is no mechanism to self-verify the voter and has to depend on others for verification like election authorities. The election conducted through traditional e-voting system requires a lot of human interventions for conducting various processes like registration, tallying etc.). The current e-voting is also prone to hacking and has a lot of vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities significantly weaken the electoral process integrity and efficiency. In order to address these issues, this research involves the development of a permissioned smart contract-based e-voting system for academic institutions suitable for the small size and medium size environments like universities etc. An Electronic voting(e-voting) system is a digital process where the elections are conducted through the electronics instead of the traditional voting system. The e-voting system provides transparency and increases the efficiency of the election process and also allows the people with disabilities to cast their votes remotely. The integration of blockchain technology with smart contracts is able to address the challenges of the traditional electronic system. The proposed system, i.e., permissioned smart contract e-voting system can maintain the transparency during the whole election process and prevent unauthorized access to the data and the fraudulent activities like voter tampering and fraudulent votes. This proposed system uses features or capabilities of blockchain technology specifically Hyperledger Fabric to establish a immutable and decentralized ledger. It also ensures the participation of the voters in a well-managed and controlled manner. It also eliminates the need for human intervention in the election process. Smart Contracts automates the whole election process and is responsible for voter registration, verification and vote tallying process. Voter data and credentials are secured and encrypted with the help of an encryption algorithm, i.e. Advanced Encryption System (AES) throughout the whole electoral process. Furthermore, this research contributes to the digital governance by demonstrating the practical use of this proposed system, i.e. permissioned blockchain system under a controlled environment. Compared to the traditional systems, the proposed framework or system can provide or demonstrate 45% improvement in operational efficiency, human intervention can also be reduced to 60% and there is a slightly huge decrease in the vote tampering and data breaches i.e. by 70%. Future enhancements includes biometric integration for voter authentication or voter verification. AI integrated, permissioned smart contract based e-voting system could be the future or future enhancement that uses facial recognition in order to improve voter authentication uses anomaly detection models to identify the potential threats.