Abstract:

University elections are considered to be a cornerstone of academic governance, as they determine leadership structures, representative bodies, and strategic decision-making processes within higher education institutions. Despite their significance, these elections are frequently conducted through centrally administered or partially manual procedures that offer limited transparency, weak guarantees for independent verification, and insufficient protection against procedural errors or internal manipulation. While blockchain-based electronic voting has been extensively explored for national and organisational elections, its systematic application to university elections remains underdeveloped, particularly from a rigorous computer science perspective that combines formal modelling, cryptographic guarantees, and quantitative experimental validation.

The present paper puts forward a blockchain-based framework for secure and verifiable university elections, with a focused case study in alignment with the institutional and regulatory context of Bulgarian higher education. The definition of a university election is a formally specified computational process, comprising voters, election events, validator nodes, and cryptographic protocols. The required security and correctness properties are rigorously stated, including eligibility, integrity, anonymity, verifiability, and resistance to double voting. These properties are expressed through precise mathematical and probabilistic formulations, thereby enabling an explicit connection between system design choices and provable guarantees.

The proposed framework is predicated on permissioned consortium blockchains and integrates cryptographic mechanisms inspired by end-to-end verifiable voting systems. The utilisation of homomorphic tallying techniques and zero-knowledge proofs serves to guarantee that election outcomes can be verified independently by voters and auditors without compromising the secrecy of individual ballots.

The proposed framework is designed to address the fundamental deficiencies in existing university electoral practices by facilitating mathematically verifiable elections that ensure the confidentiality of the ballot and the transparency of the process. The Bulgarian context is a realistic and representative case study, but the framework is designed to be extensible to other higher education systems with similar governance structures.

The present work contributes a rigorously defined, experimentally supported framework that elevates university elections to a first-class research domain within the field of blockchain-based e-voting. The paper establishes a solid foundation for future pilot deployments, extended empirical studies, and further research on decentralised and verifiable academic governance systems by combining formal modelling, cryptographic reasoning, and quantitative performance analysis.

Keywords:

Blockchain, Electronic Voting, Privacy, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Academic Governance, Decision-Making Systems.