Trust Us, We’re Algorithms!
Inevitably, blockchain is being touted as a solution to what’s wrong with democratic voting systems (is there anything blockchain is not a solution to?). There are skeptics — see e.g. Blockchain Disciples Have a New Goal: Running Our Next Election — but in general, there’s an emerging techie consensus that a working system will have to have blockchain (or something a lot like it) at its core.
Blockchain on its own does only one thing well in this context: indelibly record what the system thinks you voted (and maybe not even that if you’re using a malware-infested system to register your vote). Properly done, it will allow you to securely verify that your vote (or your malware’s vote) was properly registered.
But that solves only a small part of the long chain of vulnerabilities involved in the voting process. It doesn’t, for example, ensure that votes are tallied and reported fairly and accurately — reliably and securely knowing that you voted X or Y on some issue doesn’t mean you know your vote counted overall, or that the votes were totaled and reported accurately at all. That’s a whole other set of concerns that blockchain can’t address on its own (and nor do the more thoughtful advocates claim that it will).
And while most of the (known) vulnerabilities are at least potentially fixable or addressable with more technology¹, nothing addresses the big problem at the heart of hi-tech voting solutions such as blockchain: the radical lack of transparency they all share. Transparency is a fundamental — perhaps the most fundamental — requirement of any democratic voting process. And “transparency” here doesn’t just mean knowing that your vote was registered correctly, it means being able to see and understand or even audit in detail every aspect of the electoral process.
Here’s a rule of thumb for measuring electoral transparency in a democratic society: can the average voter at least in principle understand and audit the entire vote process, or at least their part in it?
To most voters, blockchain is and will always remain a mystery; and the associated tech processes involved in vote tallying and auditing (etc.) are effectively just black boxes to most people, not even comprehensible or auditable by them in principle, let alone in real life. The old paper processes were slow and inefficient, but you could at least understand and audit them as an ordinary voter (and if you couldn’t, you could suspect there was something fishy going on). Watching the votes being counted, and ensuring that the totals were properly transmitted and received, etc., was a tedious and tiresome process, but almost anyone could do it (I did, once, and that was enough). The process was often flawed, but it was flawed in ways most voters could understand or detect.
But like so much in the techno-libertarian universe, the new tech-based solutions just ask us to trust us, we’re algorithms!
Blockchain-based elections: a solution only techies could love. Or understand (or not). Inevitably, in the future, electoral integrity will have to rely on those techies.
“Trust us, we’re techies!”
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[1] When you hear that the cure for a technology’s ills is just more of the same technology, you know you’re in trouble…
