Paper 2026/1176

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

Abstract

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 1,000 concurrent voters. This study demonstrates that permissioned blockchains can provide practical mitigation of the verification paradox through implementation and quantitative evaluation.