SummaryIn a cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) network, the primary signal can be used as a radio frequency (RF) source in order to power the energy‐constrained sensor nodes of the secondary network. This work presents a novel hybrid model combining an optimal relay selection scheme to incorporate RF energy harvesting in a centralized CSS network. The secondary users, which are equipped with RF energy harvesting capabilities, act as relays in order to forward the sensing information to a fusion center. Here, we have derived an enhanced multi‐relay selection strategy to maximize the end‐to‐end signal‐to‐noise ratio of the links. Furthermore, a new voting rule is proposed based on the generalized K‐out‐of‐M rule, such that it minimizes our objective error function. The performance analysis of our proposed model is presented with respect to the flexible relay positions. We have used complementary receiver operating characteristic curves for analyzing the detection performance of the CSS model with our derived voting rule. Simulation results using MATLAB show that the proposed model gives a better detection probability and a smaller error rate than some related existing works.