How Blockchain Could Save Our Voting System

Voting is an essential component of any functioning entity. It’s a means of expressing your opinion on a topic, person, policy, decision — the possibilities are endless. In the United States, however, the rapidly evolving state of technology and demographic shifts have created unique challenges that threaten the reliability of conventional voting systems. This can be seen especially in the way we vote for candidates in an election.

The traditional way of casting a vote comes in the following forms:

Paper ballots

• Fill in the bubble of the candidate they chose
• Scan it at a polling place or central location
• A worker would then count the number of votes per candidate
• Record this on a tally sheet

Electronic voting machines

• Get in car and go to polling station
• Wait in line for however long for an electronic machine
• Choose the candidate of your choice
• Get back in car and drive home

The way we cast votes is both outdated and susceptible to malicious attacks, but this is the norm we live in. As a result, there are several issues surrounding security, transparency, and efficiency of this vulnerable software and process.

The problem with current voting methods:

Use of electronic voting machines

• The machines themselves are manufactured by a variety of companies that are independently contracted by the government, which makes it near impossible to implement standard regulations around their use and security.

Use of paper ballots

• The use of paper ballots, while less susceptible to manipulation, is a labor-intensive process. Additionally, a lack of consistent security updates and frequent software bugs has made the record of votes extremely unreliable, with votes often being switched to another candidate (Vice News).

Labor-intensive process

• It takes an army to man the polls, physically count the paper ballots, and oversee the electronic voting machines if they go down or have an internet connection issue.

Voter turnout rates

• Voter turnout percentages in younger generations have steadily declined over the last two decades, with currently only around 20% of eligible young voters casting votes in the 2014 midterms according to the New York Times.
• There is a decline in interest, the number of available voting stations per capita has been decreasing as the population continues to grow, forcing many on election days to wait hours in line to vote. This further disincentivizes people to go out and engage in civic participation.

Security vulnerability

• Though uncommon, voter fraud is a legitimate concern; a recent example reported by the New York Times details fraud through the use of absentee ballots to cast votes in North Carolina.
• “Contrary to popular belief, [electronic voting] equipment can be hacked via the Internet because all such equipment must receive programming before each election from memory cards or USB sticks prepared on the county’s election management system, which connects to the Internet.” (New York Review daily)

These issues are hindering the confidence others have in their ability to vote. Voting is simple. You do it to express your opinion. If people become indifferent, the rights that we take for granted will slowly be eroded until it is too late to enact social change for the better.

Next Steps:

Three words. As a team. That’s where Spartan Blockchain Solutions from Michigan State University comes in. The team of five, with several different educational backgrounds, started to think. The idea was to create something small in relation to a blockchain platform. It started out having Sam Stevons, the project manager, issue a meeting to discuss what a new and improved system could accomplish. As we progressed further into the details, technical analysts, Neil Potduhke and Jerry LaGore realized that we needed to further scale out how we could finish a broad project from a software standpoint. With the help of Zachariah Dittenbir and Gabriel Aroh, they assisted in categorizing our problems to flow into something each of us could focus on and manage.

Solution:

A voting blockchain-based solution that enables users to easily select a candidate and see their vote recorded.

The Plan:

Create a small-scale proof-of-concept — blockchain voting system. To do this, we developed a web interface with the following components:

• 1. Registration — name, home address, SSN, etc. (depends on use case)
• 2. Candidate selection — pick which candidate you would like to vote for and have name, party, and hometown listed under them
• 3. Results — view live results of votes as they are inputted

Our plan is to execute this through a blockchain-based voting system built entirely from Python code. Smart contracts will be used to log votes and would have functions called to display results, candidates, store voter information on the blockchain. Our intent is to roll this out at Michigan State University, specifically for student-run groups and organizations. We hope that by doing this, we can see how the system would operate and make necessary adjustments.

Accomplishments:

This would reassure people that their vote will be counted, eliminate fraud and tampering, and provide quick results. There would essentially be no paper involved or physically counting paper ballots that could elicit lots of resources, time, and manpower. The use of blockchain technology would allow for transparency and accuracy in a way that is not currently possible on voting machines running decades-old software.

Short term vision…

From here, we hope to ramp up the system to introduce it to a wider range of audiences. The plan is to reach out to organizations across Michigan State’s campus and learn how they conduct voting through E-Board elections, policy amendments; the list goes on. Most of what clubs on campus do is count the number of hands when voting for important measures. That takes up time and energy. This solution could eliminate this. Reaching out to leaders in organizations across campus is the first step in introducing our project and gauging interest. That would, in turn, allow us to test-drive our system and explore how it interacts with large groups of people.

Long term vision…

Progressing into the future, we would like to further integrate this project to the general public. People want convivence, accessibility, and quick results when recording a vote. The next step would be to integrate the project into a mobile app. Now anyone could access the system and would further connect users to their phones and enable the ability to vote virtually. This would in hopes encourage people to vote since now others have it at their fingertips. Voter participation could increase and attract younger generations to participate in voting. We hope that as people become more accustomed to this type of voting, then we could receive the government’s approval to utilize more blockchain-based systems in the future.

Future Partnership…

Voatz is a blockchain company that focuses on the voting system. We could partner up with this company to get more insights on things needed to be considered to run a very good amicable blockchain voting platform moving forward. Voatz blockchain voting system is already in use in West Virginia as an option for citizens who are overseas, military personnel, and local citizens who choose to remain indoors. Two of the fifty-five counties in the state tried using it in the 2018 primary elections and only 13 people used it to vote. This says we still have a long way to go but encourages teams like us to keep pursuing this idea and blockchain system.