Blockchain and Elections: A Review of the Current Landscape
What should our elections look like in the blockchain era?
As we enter into the digital age, election technology is struggling to keep up. While freedom and fairness have always been considered essential to democratic elections, security and integrity are concerns rising in lockstep with the transition to electronic voting systems. As voting goes digital, liberal democracies must ensure that new voting technology systems are secure and transparent from end to end — their legitimacy may depend on it.
Current issues with electronic voting
As it stands,our electronic voting systems are broken and online voting faces daunting challenges. At the most recent DEF CON Voting Village, hackers exploited vulnerabilities in dozens of electronic voting machines — some in a matter of mere minutes. This hackathon, held annually since 2004, has repeatedly and systematically exposed the woeful state of our election cybersecurity. Beyond susceptibility to external hacking, many states use outdated machines which frequently break down during elections, requiring out-of-production replacement parts and other hardware repairs. In this year’s midterm elections, 41 states will be using voting machines that are at least a decade old, making obsolete software and antiquated hardware central to our democracy. These breakdowns lead to long lines at polling places, dampened enthusiasm for the democratic process, and even effective disenfranchisement.
In addition to the failure of electronic voting systems at physical polling locations, many experts also distrust online voting systems from remote locations. Current online voting systems are susceptible to hacking (such as denial-of-service attacks), are not publicly auditable, and fail to adequately verify identity. Remote voting also opens up voters to potential coercion or bribery for their votes. Current online voting systems do not have the security infrastructure required to maintain integrity, but emerging solutions based on blockchain could resolve many of the current concerns faced by online voting platforms.
The utter failures of cybersecurity in current voting systems has led some to conclude that old-fashioned paper ballots audited by hand are the most reliable way to run elections. But this system runs into age-old issues of human error and fraud. With increased polarization in U.S. politics, even ostensibly nonpartisan election officials and vote-counters could have incentive to tamper with or miscount paper ballots. Even supposedly secure paper-ballot voting requires trust in third-parties to accurately and honestly count the vote, a difficult ask as faith in democratic institutions erodes. As the world continues to be digitized, a paper-ballot system does not engage with emerging voting technologies, and will limit voting to those are able to physically show up at the polls and individuals whose absentee ballots are not rejected by election officials.
Without a doubt, forward-thinking public officials will continue to push for online voting, but they must acknowledge the shortfalls of current online voting systems while recognizing which developing technologies could overcome these disadvantages. Public officials must ask, if online and electronic voting systems are the future, what sort of properties do they need to have to maintain security and trust?
The blockchain voting solution
Blockchain technology is one potential solution to our election security crisis. While the technology is young, it has characteristics which could ensure security and transparency in voting systems. Fundamentally, blockchain is an immutable ledger of information (data) which is publicly accessible (read: publicly auditable). Current election systems rely on third-parties to collect and tally votes, either humans susceptible to corruption or centralized databases vulnerable to hacking efforts. Blockchain election systems will render this third-party meaningless, as the transparency of the blockchain itself allows platform participants to track votes as they are cast and recorded, with each vote being cryptographically timestamped. The decentralization of blockchain voting platforms, with a record of votes cast validated by multiple nodes (computers) in the network, will ensure that no single hackable database will be relied upon to provide an accurate vote count.
While a voting blockchain will be publicly auditable, it can also use advanced cryptography to encrypt the identities of voters. Thus the public will be able to see how many votes are cast, the time they are recorded, and who they were cast for, but the identities of voters will be anonymous. While voters will be required to verify their authenticity before casting votes, their voting records could be hidden from the general public, and even government administrators who might wish to punish them for their political beliefs. Blockchain voting solutions have the potential to ensure both transparency for the purposes of election auditing and anonymity for individual voters.
Technological concerns surrounding blockchain voting
While blockchain voting systems have unique characteristics which bypass many of the current barriers facing online voting systems, the technology currently faces challenges which make widespread adoption a long-term possibility rather than a short-term priority. For one, blockchain election solutions will need to emphasize user experience to ensure that voters can confidently cast their votes. Whether this be through an end-to-end mobile application or integration with current in-person voting technologies, voters should be certain they know how to cast and track the integrity of their votes.
Additionally, while the encryption we use today requires massive computing power to decrypt, experts claim that quantum computing will be 100 million times faster than classical modes of computation. If we use blockchain election systems to secure our votes today, what will happen years or decades down the road when quantum computers are able to decrypt those election results? Will governments in the future be able to crack down on political dissent based on voting patterns from prior elections? While the blockchain’s immutability makes it an excellent candidate for securing the integrity, transparency, and anonymity of our elections today, this very feature could make it susceptible to decryption in the future. The questions surrounding quantum computing and blockchain elections have yet to be sufficiently answered. At the very least, they must be considered.
Current policy landscape
Currently, online voting is allowed only in select states, and the right is only extended to certain citizens. Over 20 states allow voters covered by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) to access ballots online and return them through email or fax. Of these 20+ states, only 5 (Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, North Dakota, and West Virginia) offer a web portal for soldiers deployed overseas to vote through.
Due to security concerns, these online voting opportunities have not been extended to regular citizens in each state. Even as technologies supporting end-to-end online voting develop, there has been a backlash building against electronic voting due to the vulnerability of current electronic voting systems and fears of foreign influence in the 2016 presidential elections. This backlash has led multiple states to look backwards, moving their votes from electronic systems without paper trails to paper ballots.
In the midst of uncertainty, however, one state, West Virginia, has moved forward with blockchain-based voting. In the midterm elections this November, the state will offer a mobile blockchain voting option for UOCAVA-eligible voters stationed abroad to remedy the inconsistency of absentee ballots. Developed by blockchain technology firm Voatz, overseas soldiers and eligible family members will access the ballot via a mobile application which will store votes to a permissioned blockchain viewable to the public (with anonymity of the voters intact). Only election officials will have access to the identity of the voters, and can track each vote recorded to the blockchain back to a confirmed eligible voter.
Next steps for blockchain election systems implementation
While West Virginia’s blockchain-based voting is only a pilot program accessible to a small number of voters, it provides a blueprint for moving forward with potentially transformative online voting technologies. Depending on West Virginia’s success, other states which are at the vanguard of online voting should look to integrate blockchain technology into their online voting initiatives. While few would argue that the technology is a voting panacea, particularly at this stage in its development, it could certainly be an improvement over current voting systems, particularly for those who are unable to reach a physical polling location on election day.
As more states begin to pilot blockchain-based voting systems, their programs can serve as proofs-of-concept for the security and accessibility of new online voting systems. If these programs prove successful, there will be a real potential for forward-looking states to implement voting solutions which take into account the inevitable digitization of our democracy. Only through the combined efforts of both policymakers and technologists can we ensure a smooth transition from antiquated voting systems to the secure and transparent end-to-end online voting systems of the future.
Blockchain-based voting initiatives worth following:
Special thanks to Nir Kabessa for helping conceptualize and edit this piece.
