A Consortium Blockchain Framework for Scalable E-Voting in Academic Institutions

The integrity and scalability of electoral processes within large-scale academic institutions are often compromised by centralized vulnerabilities and high computational overhead. This paper proposes a novel, hierarchical consortium blockchain framework designed for Indian university ecosystem to facilitate secure, transparent, and high-concurrency e-voting. By utilizing tiered architecture comprising establishment-level private sidechains and global university-wide Ethereum ledger, proposed system optimizes trade-off between voter anonymity and transactional throughput by integrating Linkable Ring Signatures and Zero- Knowledge Proofs to ensure the Secret Ballot principle while maintaining public auditability. Experimental evaluations on with N = 4000 participants demonstrate an average gas consumption of 15,580 units per voter and peak throughput of 181 TPS. Experimental results reveal 11.5% reduction in per-voter processing latency compared to state-of-the-art models, showing proposed framework efficacy for high-density academic environments.