Deployability Versus Ballot Secrecy in Blockchain-Based Voting for Low-Resource Democracies: A Zambian Case Study

This paper examines the tension between deployability and ballot secrecy in blockchain-based voting systems, with Zambia as the application domain.

The prototype is grounded in Zambia’s Electoral Process Act No. 35 of 2016, mapping statutory provisions down to SI regulation level into executable Solidity smart contracts. Seven electoral law provisions are enforced directly in code. A proxy-signing architecture addresses the voter key-management problem identified in prior literature.

The paper analyses two critical privacy failures in the current implementation — a database ballot secrecy vulnerability and a plaintext event emission on-chain — and discusses the tradeoffs these represent for deployability in low-resource electoral contexts.

Status: Submitted and under review — E-Vote-ID 2026 PhD Colloquium, Track 5 (submitted 7 July 2026). Notification expected 14 August 2026.