How Blockchain Encrypted Voting Can Save Democracy-based Systems
In the furore of the hotly contested US Presidential Election a new solution to ensure fair and transparent voting may be coming into its own behind the scenes. This article explains the possibilities and benefits of using a blockchain based voting system to end the rancour and claims of unlawfulness.
Rahul A R, a technologist and specialist developer in Blockchain technologies and Cryptocurrencies at blog.accubits.com offers his expert insight:
“In one suggested implementation, the voter would receive a paper ballot on which would be printed an individualized, computer-readable code. The voter could then scan the code with a mobile device, verify his or her identification, and then cast the ballot digitally. This system would separate the voter ID from the actual vote to maintain anonymity, with the votes stored on the blockchain.
But with so many arguments against online voting, can it really be superior to traditional voting systems?
Traditional voting systems
Using the traditional voting systems during a pandemic could lead to more wide spread of the pandemic as voters are requested to cast votes from a voting booth, which are mostly crowded. With the exception of Estonia, that successfully implemented online voting in 2007, most nations still stick to the traditional mode of voting, i.e., paper ballots. It requires the citizens to be physically present at a location to cast their vote which may not make much sense considering how connected we are today. People shy away from digitizing the process because of security risks associated with putting everything online. However, there are many problems with the traditional mode of voting as well.
For example, the Turkish general election of 2015 was fraught with controversies and allegations of electoral fraud with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) smack in the middle of it. The AKP allegedly used state resources like state funds, media, and vehicles for the campaign. The Supreme Electoral Council of Turkey also came under investigation for printing an excess of over 20 million ballot papers for a population of 50 million raising questions about how the surplus papers would be used.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Election fraud is a reality for many countries albeit to varying degrees. NGOs and IGOs are sometimes appointed to monitor elections. But they aren’t foolproof either. The monitors aren’t usually familiar with the lay of the land and they don’t collaborate with the locals to remain neutral which hampers their ability to effectively evaluate the votes. Also, in the case of IGOs, which are made of a group of countries, the monitors at times have to verify or risk destabilizing that region. Adding to that, since IGOs are made up of multiple countries, it’s always a possibility that the monitoring would be unwittingly influenced to serve those nations’ interests.
Using blockchain based voting systems for safer elections
With so many issues surrounding the traditional mode of voting, it is safe to say that we need a safer option that could promote the transparency of the process.
Can we rely on blockchain technology for voting systems?
Simply put, Blockchain is a digital ledger. This technology is highly secure while affording an unparalleled level of transparency among authorized users. This is because all transactions are recorded on a “chain” maintained across millions of nodes on a network. It is cryptographically secure; you cannot edit or remove a single detail without the other parties verifying it. This makes it essentially immutable. Let’s see how we can integrate these features of blockchain into the voting system. If you’d like to learn more about the technology, check out this article explaining what is blockchain technology?
Voter Registration
The Estonian government, when they introduced online voting, assigned a national ID card with encrypted files that identified the owner. A blockchain enabled identity management system could record this information in an immutable ledger. Relevant authorities could be given access to this blockchain and the citizen’s information can be verified by government miner through local government administration offices in the district, government utility services like water and electricity. Once the individual’s information is verified to be accurate, they can be assigned a vote. This essentially eliminates fake voter data which is the main cause for allegations like dead people voting. This was something that came up during the Turkish elections.
Secure Online Voting
While a majority of the voting population shows up at polling stations to cast their votes, there are still a number of people who don’t show up at all. This indifference results in lost votes and lack of participation in the democratic process of the country. It’s usually because of the inconvenience; people would rather be in the comfort of their homes rather than out in a long queue, waiting for their turn to vote. If the voting can be done by phone or computer, then more people would join in the democratic process. We could use blockchain voting systems to secure online voting. Such an application wouldn’t have to worry about hackers because the processing power required to affect every single node on the blockchain is monumental.
Voting Options
Blockchain offers a number of options with which the actual voting can be made more secure.
Tokens as votes: In this case, each token would be a vote for a citizen. They can cast their votes from an electronic device linked to the blockchain and by virtue of being on a blockchain, no one would question the final count as every transaction is time-stamped and in case changes are made, a trail of the same would be present. Demanding recounts is something that many losing candidates resort to and it is a very costly process. By putting the votes as tokens on a Blockchain, we can discourage such demands.
Voting through smart contracts: In this case, the citizen can be assigned a smart contract vote which is valid for one execution on the election day. While the vote will be valid and secure, it won’t be anonymous. What can be done in such a case is by linking the public key of the voter to an alias that only the voter can access.
A potential approach for implementing a blockchain based voting system
A number of approaches can be taken in order to successfully use blockchain technology for electronic voting. On hearing the term ‘blockchain voting system’, it is natural to wonder how such a system can be implemented. We have outlined a potential solution to this problem below. There are a few major points that are associated with the functioning of such a blockchain voting system.
The blockchain-based e-voting scheme is public, distributed, and decentralized. It can record votes from voters across many mobile devices and computers. It should allow the voters to audit and verify the votes in an inexpensive manner. The database of votes should be managed autonomously using a distributed server of timestamp on a peer-to-peer network.
The voting blockchain is represented as a growing series of voting blocks chained to each other in a sequential manner. Each block contains voter’s ID, vote, voter’s signature, timestamp, and hash of the previous block. Public key infrastructure is a set of procedures that manage public-key encryption. Vote database changes according to the statistics of votes that are updated by the voting office and miners are responsible to deal with accepted votes and adding them to the public voting blockchain.
The voter’s voting interface creates a hash value of the voter ID, vote and timestamp. The program then uses the voter’s unique private key to generate a signature of the hash value. This signature and hash value is send to the miner block.
Miners are elected in random from the miner block and a miner obtains the public key of the voter from the PKI using the voter’s ID. Using the public key, a miner creates a new hash based on the data available from PKI and compares it with the hash sent by the voter. If both hashes match, the signature is verified successfully. Otherwise the signature is discarded.
The miner then sends queries and verifies that voter has the right to vote and after verification, the miner generates a new block with the previous block’s hash value and the information of vote and adds it to the blockchain.
Each vote is stored as a transaction on the blockchain and each voter receives the transaction ID for their vote for verifying purposes. Each vote is appended onto the blockchain by its corresponding ballot smart contract. The network is appended only if all corresponding district nodes agree on the verification of the vote data. When a voter casts his vote, the weight of their wallet is decreased by 1, therefore not enabling them to vote more than once per election.
Benefits of blockchain voting systems
Evidently, there are several advantages that can be experienced upon the implementation of blockchain voting systems. Some of the major benefits are:
- Reduces the security vulnerabilities associated with normal e-voting.
- Increases the trust of the people in the government since it is more transparent than traditional voting systems
- Secure and anonymous votes, which can be verified at any moment
- Low operational cost, manual control is not required
- Impossibility to vote twice or to commit electoral fraud
- It is much more convenient for voters
- It will make it very easy for people with disabilities to vote.
- Quick and private method of voting
- Increases the number of voters, since the process isn’t nearly as time consuming
- It is much better for the environment as it eliminates the need for paper voting and the carbon emitted by the logistics of voting ballots. “
Read the full article at blog.accubits.com
About the author: Rahul A R is a technologist and full stack developer who specializes in Blockchain technologies and Cryptocurrencies. Though he’s worked within numerous privacy and security sectors, Rahul’s recent emphasis has been on solutions built on Ethereum, Tezos, smart contracts, and smart signatures, in particular, decentralized self-sovereign identity. He’s Helped clients, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, across North America and Asia, develop their blockchain strategy and build several decentralized applications using blockchains and smart contracts.
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Jacques
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Technology, technology, technology ….
No technology will save man if man keeps resorting to external means (technologies) instead of focusing on inner development, mastering oneself (stopping being dickhead).
The usefulness of technologies for the life of humanity has already reached a peak beyond which it’s detrimental. We don’t need more technologies – whatever we have now is good enough for comfortable life. We need to work on intellectual, spiritual maturity.
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Tom O
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I tend to agree with you, Jacques. The process described, as it struck me, is to again, make it as lazy as possible to accomplish a solemn obligation, and we are in the position we are in because we have taken responsibility and obligation out of traditional processes with “technologies.”
I find the idea of mailing out the ballot forms on a secure form to voters that are eligible, for them to fill out and drop off at a collection point to be a reasonable balance of making it easy to vote and requiring responsible action. Setting a “drop dead date” for collection adds to that, thus forcing people to vote within a specified window of opportunity. The collection point time locks and then are picked up and taken to a facility to scan and record the results. A lot of extra work for the governments involved, and adds cost, but since the voter is also a tax payer, at least he is getting something for his taxes.
Can it be compromised? To those that want to, I suppose anything can be compromised. the collection ppoint could be located inside at the local municipal office, court house, or even police station, as an example, and I would think no legitimate voter would have an issue with dropping their ballot off there. It could be wired into a network to notify when it is 60% full and swapped out with another, then taken to the counting facility to be emptied and reset under the observation of a member from each party, and each “watchdog” organization overseeing the election. Same would apply to the physical collection, member of each party and watchdog present. Then they could be processed, again under observation, and all can verify the tally as they come in. With all ballots mailed out to eligible voters, the only way an additional ballot can then be created would be for someone to come in and physically register to vote as a new eligible and cast their vote in person. Can they be verified at that time? With the data collection that has been done by governments and individual companies, I would find it difficult to believe they couldn’t be.
I’d like to see the demise of the “smartphone,” not give it greater utility. It has done more damage to society than it has benefited it. Yes, that is a personal opinion only, and not likely to ever change.
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John the First
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The suggested technology is a pathetic way of saving a corrupt system which is at the end of its durability (democracy). It signifies one step more into the labyrinth and inhuman slavery of technology, it is no different from the attempts of the control freaks of technocracy. If you must tackle corruption in this soulless way, id’s say, corruption is at least human. Away with this nerd stuff.
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Allan Shelton
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Jacques……
You sound like the man who said the patent office will soon be closed.
Total BS
Charles H. Duell
In 1889, Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office. He is widely quoted as having stated that the patent office would soon shrink in size, and eventually close, because… “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
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Jacques
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You’ve completely missed the point. The point is that external means (technologies) won’t solve internal problems.
The more man will employ technologies for his atrophying capabilities – mental, physical, intellectual, spiritual, integrity – the more they will atrophy.
Man is now on course toward replacing himself with machine. Pretty phantasmagorical if you as me. How the patent office enters into this, I understand not.
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Joseph Olson
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BlackBoxVoting.org > the electronic, fractional vote rigging machines
“Interview on Electronic Vote Fraud” by CD Media with Russ Ramsland
https://youtu.be/ficae6x1Q5A
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Robert Beatty
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If this is as effective as described, I can see a use for it in frequently, and cost effectively, asking the population which alternative they support on critical issues. We currently suffer from only getting a one time choice to support a ‘mandate’, which may or may not be followed by the elected government of the day. The alternative is Citizens Initiated Referendum (CIR) which has the potential to change our top-down system of government into the more democratic bottom-up system. CIR requires that any major policy changes proposed by a government need to be individually supported by a majority of the electorate. Blockchain would allow this to happen in a routine way.
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John the First
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Bottom-up system, would you prefer the arse to be in control, instead of the head.. For the stupidity of the mobs to rule over intelligence, even when the latter is malevolent, doesn’t seem to be a good idea.
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Tom Anderson
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Too true. Citizen referendums are long standing and common in California, where the process is referred to a government by bumper sticker.
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Tom Anderson
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Correction “referred to as … bumper sticker.”
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