Anonymous E-Voting on Hyperledger Fabric: Practical Mitigation of the Verification Paradox and Coercion Resistance

Electronic voting systems inherently encompass a structural tension among ballot secrecy, verifiability, and coercion resistance. Voters must be able to verify whether their votes have been included; however, if such verification information can serve as evidence presentable to a third party, it becomes a basis for post-election intimidation. Existing studies have focused primarily on performance evaluation or data separation, and have not comprehensively addressed the structural tension between verifiability and coercion resistance.

This study defines this tension as the verification paradox and designs and implements an electronic voting prototype on a three-organization consortium based on Hyperledger Fabric 2.5, combining a 2-of-3 endorsement policy, nullifier-based anonymity, Exponential ElGamal homomorphic tallying, zero-knowledge proof (ZKP)-based ballot validity verification, panic-password-based deniable verification, and Private Data Collection (PDC)-based coerced vote separation. Quantitative evaluation results confirm a server latency overhead of +0.9% for ElGamal relative to the AES performance baseline, statistical indistinguishability between normal and panic responses (p>0.05), and a peak throughput of approximately 40.7 TPS (with an error rate of 0%) under 1000 concurrent voters. Through this prototype implementation and quantitative evaluation, we show the potential of permissioned blockchains to partially and practically mitigate the verification paradox.

This study, however, does not provide a formal security proof, and it is subject to a trust assumption on PDC as well as to the experimental limitations of a single evaluation environment and a limited load range.