A Proof-of-Concept Architecture for A Blockchain-Based Electoral System for Nigeria

Background of the study: Nigeria’s electoral process has faced systemic ailments like voter intimidation, stuffing of ballot boxes, results alteration, and collation delays leading to a massive decline in voter turnout over the years. Goal of the experiment: These issues stem primarily from over-centralization of the entire electoral process. Most of the vulnerabilities and issues persisted even after the introduction of electronic voting and result transmission technologies, ranging from technical malfunctions to vulnerability to insider interference and manipulation. Method/Experiments carried out: Our approach to combat some of these issues leverages Hyperledger Fabric’s permissioned blockchain with Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus to ensure electoral transparency while preserving ballot secrecy. For the proposed voting process, we implemented a local proof-of-concept that demonstrates the entire voting process, from voter authentication, which relies on an email-based voter authentication with a One-Time Password (OTP) verification sent to the email. Once authenticated, voters make and confirm their choice, and then the system has their vote anonymized, and the validator nodes verify the vote’s legitimacy before permanent on-chain recording. Results and Conclusion: We designed a proof-of-concept that was able to successfully prove that the core architectural principles like immutable vote recording, distributed consensus, vote privacy and real-time result verification were achievable. Although the current implementation is limited to a local setup, it provides a foundation for large-scale deployment that could restore trust in the Nigerian democratic process.