Abstract
Voting is fundamental to exercising civic rights, and its proper administration is critical for ensuring trust in the democratic process. As the size of the voting population increases, and the on-time pronouncement of victors becomes essential, electronic voting machines and systems have emerged as crucial components of election administration. Existing security methods, such as centralized server-based authentication or traditional public-key cryptography, often suffer from major limitations, including single points of failure (SPOF) and poor scalability. Blockchain systems that rely on Proof of Work (PoW) or Proof of Stake (PoS) also introduce their own problems, such as lower throughput, high energy consumption, and increasing vulnerability to emerging post-quantum attacks. However, recent confusion and misinformation campaigns over fraudulent voting and improper counting in the USA and elsewhere point to the potential chaos that could ensue and how citizens’ privacy could be threatened. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based hybrid consensus voting mechanism called the Post Quantum Secured Hierarchical Authoritative Consensus (PQSHAC), to improve privacy and trust in contemporary systems to improve dependability. The optimized sharding protocol we introduce utilizes the inherently distributed nature of election data to help reduce skewness and increase the cohesion of individual shards. We prevent extraneous voting and ensure voter privacy using a novel token generation protocol. The experiments demonstrate that PQSHAC achieves a throughput of ≈106blocks/s with a block generation time of 28 s for 3000 blocks using a 5-shard configuration. Additionally, the proposed modular ledger architecture reduces storage requirements by approximately 60% compared to non-modular approaches, while maintaining robust security against quantum computing attacks via Dilithium-3 integration. This findings demonstrate PQSHAC’s strengths over its competitors.