Zero-Knowledge Proof-Enabled Blockchain Protocol for Tamper-Resistant Electronic Voting Systems
Annotatsiya
Electronic voting systems are increasingly being explored to enhance accessibility, efficiency, and speed in modern electoral processes. However, ensuring vote integrity, privacy, and auditability remains a major challenge, especially in remote and online voting environments. Traditional electronic voting methods often face issues such as data tampering, lack of end-to-end verifiability, and potential privacy breaches, which undermine public trust and electoral transparency. To address these issues, this paper proposes the ZK-VOTE (Zero-Knowledge Verified Online Tamper-resistant Election) framework, which integrates zk-SNARKs with a permissioned blockchain protocol. In this system, voters generate zero-knowledge proofs to verify their eligibility and the validity of their votes without disclosing sensitive information. Each vote is immutably recorded on a permissioned blockchain, ensuring transparency while maintaining voter anonymity. The use of consensus algorithms prevents unauthorized alterations to voting records, and smart contracts automatically enforce vote submission rules. The ZK-VOTE framework is particularly suited for national-scale elections, enabling secure remote voting for diaspora populations while ensuring system-wide auditability. Election authorities and third-party auditors can independently verify election results without accessing private voter data. Experimental evaluation and theoretical analysis demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high levels of privacy, resistance to tampering, and verifiability. Results confirm that ZK-VOTE enhances voter trust and electoral transparency while remaining computationally efficient. The framework represents a significant advancement toward secure, scalable, and trustworthy electronic voting systems.