National electronic voting systems require
robust auditability, non-repudiation, forward secrecy,
and fault tolerance under predictable but highly
variable workloads. Existing protocols within
permissioned blockchain networks usually favor low
latency or long-lasting identities of business entities,
which are assumptions that do not fully correspond to
adversarial election environments.
This paper presents a feasibility study of a time-slotbased permissioned blockchain architecture designed
for state elections involving semi-trusted but mutually
adversarial validators. The basic mechanism of the
system is a block authentication scheme with
advanced security, based on ephemeral key pairs:
validators publish the public key for block N+1 within
block N, after which they use the corresponding
private key once to sign the next block and
immediately delete it permanently.
As part of the research, a multi-node prototype was
implemented as a customized infrastructure of
permissioned blockchain in the Node.js environment,
with the application of Ed25519 digital signatures,
explicit block finalization, peer-to-peer communication
between validators and full signature verification by all
participants. Empirical evaluation in a simulated wide
area network (WAN) environment shows a stable
throughput of approximately 274 transactions per
second, with a median finalization (p50) of 10.7
seconds and a 99th percentile (p99) of under 21
seconds.
A projection on an election scenario involving six
million voters during the 13:00 voting period indicates
an average safety factor load of approximately 2.1. The
presented results of the proposed model should be
interpreted as a proof of concept obtained in a
controlled prototype environment, and not as a
complete validation of the production capacity on a
geographically distributed election infrastructure. The
findings indicate technical feasibility under defined
assumptions and demonstrate how domain-specific
transaction clustering, ephemeral key authentication,
and explicit validator signatures can support an
auditable consensus layer for electronic voting. Out of
scope for this current study are client-side privacy
protection, coercion resistance, and full end-to-end
ballot secrecy. Our structural architecture explicitly
hardens the consensus and ledger layers instead.
electronic voting; permissioned
blockchain; forward security; ephemeral keys;
auditability consensus protocols; blockchain
infrastructure; scalability evaluation
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