# Electronic Voting System Using an Enterprise Blockchain
## 3 The Case of Electronic Voting
### Why Hyperledger Fabric?  
Hyperledger Fabric is a distributed database that records batches of network transactions in blocks organized in a chain. Sophisticated cryptographic algorithms reinforce the integrity of each block in the chain. The ledger is created and maintained by a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, where each new block is committed in the global ledger by the members of the P2P network after the successful completion of the decentralized consensus procedure, finally endowing the system with a log of fully auditable transactions.  
Permissionless and permissioned traditional blockchain platforms follow a sequential execution style, whereby transactions in smart contracts are typically executed after consensus or entwined with it and where all participants execute all contracts. The order-execute architecture shown in Figure 3 limits scalability, requires sequential transactions, and endorsement by all peers [23].  
HF was devised to use a different architecture that supports scalability and flexible trust assumptions. Rethinking the notion of permissioned blockchains occurs by introducing a cutting-edge approach that revamps the way blockchains manage non-deterministic events and security issues, such as resource exhaustion or Denial of Service (DoS) attacks [23]. Hyperledger Fabric uses a new execute-order-validate architecture, in which transactions are executed and endorsed first, before ordering them and validating that they do not conflict, as illustrated in Figure 4.  
The execute-order-validate architecture departs radically from the order-execute paradigm because it separates the transaction flow into modular building blocks and includes elements of scalable replicated databases [23]. The platform supports pluggable consensus protocols that allow it to fit into specific trust models. One can take advantage of consensus protocols that do not require a native cryptocurrency. Avoidance of a cryptocurrency reduces some significant risk/attack vectors, and the absence of cryptographic mining operations means that the platform can be deployed with roughly the same opera  
Figure 3: Traditional architecture for building blockchains.  
tional cost as any other distributed system [24; 25]. Cryptographic operations performed by HF nodes can be delegated to a Hardware Security Module (HSM) that protects private keys and handles cryptographic operations, allowing nodes to sign and validate transactions without exposing their private keys. HF currently leverages the PKCS11 standard to communicate with an HSM.  
In this way, HF allows organizations to collaborate in the creation of blockchain networks. Logically, an organization is a security domain and a unit of identity and credentials; additionally, each organization can deploy an unlimited number of nodes and its own CA to generate the identities of its nodes. \"An organization can also be divided into multiple organizational units, each of which has a certain set of responsibilities, also referred to as affiliations. Think of an OU as a department inside an organization\", which can be used in access control. Organizations/affiliations provide the ability to design custom network configurations customized to fit several scenarios. The combination of these features makes HF one of the better performing platforms [22; 23; 26] available today, both in terms of transaction processing and transaction confirmation latency; it also enables the use of smart contracts, privacy, and confidentiality of transactions [27], offering a versatile method to solve many of the problems of the electoral system by providing an efficient architecture for the execution, ordering, validation, and committing of transactions (votes) in blocks, the collection of data (vote count) and the declaration of results, while ensuring security.