Enhancing Security and Scalability in Electronic Voting Through Privacy-Preserving Cryptography and Efficient Data Structures

E-voting systems often face risks such as data breaches, vote manipulation, and lack of voter confidence. Balancing security and anonymity has posed significant obstacles that obscured the immense potential of electronic voting systems. This paper addresses critical challenges in e-voting, including security vulnerabilities, lack of transparency, scalability and user accessibility issues. We propose a privacy-preserving framework to tackle these challenges, enhancing the security, transparency and scalability of e-voting systems. Our framework leverages blockchain to provide a tamper-evident ledger, zero-knowledge proofs to ensure ballot secrecy and data integrity and Merkle Trees to facilitate data storage in a scalable manner. Furthermore, we present findings of the framework's performance that was conducted under an e-voting use case, while we suggest improvements towards an even more secure and transparent framework.