SECURE AND TRANSPARENT BLOCKCHAIN-BASED E-VOTING SYSTEM WITH SMART CONTRACTS, DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY, AND EMAIL AUTHENTICATION
The primary mechanism usually used to preserve democracy in a particular society is election. Blockchain (BC) and other recent technology developments have previously been used in earlier projects to implement unconventional e-Voting systems. The primary objective of these suggestions is to retain openness, confidence, and distant elections while offering the required degree of security and dependability. However, BC's notoriety and dispersed nature created additional privacy and performance trade-off issues. By combining smart contracts for dependability and transparency, Differential Privacy to improve vote anonymity, and Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI) for maintaining decentralized identity and verifiable credentials, this study seeks to overcome current privacy and performance difficulties in e-voting. Specifically, a novel (k, ε)-differential privacy strategy is created that allows statistical vote approximation while maintaining anonymity by using a randomly chosen candidate as a pivot to redistribute retrievable votes to other candidates. In order to improve user engagement, the system also incorporates a real-time notification system that, following completion of the voting process, sends a confirmation message to the user's registered mobile device, such as "Vote successfully cast". Different transaction arrival speeds (10–80 TX/s), total votes cast (10k–50k), and numbers of elected candidates (2–8) are among the parameters under which the suggested techniques are assessed. The smart contract is built on a cloudhosted, permissioned blockchain network utilizing Hyperledger Besu, with geographically dispersed nodes in Google's EU and USA data centers, in order to verify its realistic implementation. According to experimental data, BP-Vot outperforms current solutions in latency by 24% (≈ 1 s/TX vs. 1.24 s/TX). Additionally, the system regularly provides over 98% accuracy in estimated vote outcomes using a standardized Min-Max regression algorithm; accuracy increases linearly with vote volume. Additionally, the robustness of the suggested differential privacy model against reconstruction assaults is officially confirmed. KEYWORDS: leakage-resilient anonymous multi-receiver encryption (LR-AMRE), leakage-resilient anonymous heterogeneous multi-receiver hybrid encryption (LR-AHMR-HE)