Ballots and blockchain - Should we believe the hype?

Every day, we see countless products, services and companies seeking to capitalise on the apparent technology saviour that is blockchain.

For the uninitiated, blockchain is a decentralised digital ledger of transactions or information which eliminates the need for a central trusted authority. Supporting this is an underlying cryptographic protocol which organises the information stored into sequential blocks which are linked or 'chained' in such a way that the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks.

In this regard, blockchain offers the promise of an excellent tamper-proof mechanism for demonstrating the integrity of recorded information in a permanent and verifiable way and one of the potential uses for blockchain is for elections and in particular in the field of online voting.

Blockchain been an area of active research at Smartmatic since 2014. In 2016 we implemented the first recorded use of blockchain in a binding online election to demonstrate vote integrity for the Presidential Primary election for the Republican Party in Utah. Since then, there have been a rush of other companies seeking to capitalise on the blockchain phenomenon and to jump in the blockchain voting bandwagon.

But is blockchain really the saviour for election integrity that many claim? Should we believe the hype?

Probably not right now....but that's not to say it doesn't have promise and currently, when applied to discrete parts of the election process, it can add process improvements.

So what are the current issues surrounding blockchain and elections and why might it not be ready for 'prime-time' today?

Firstly, many public blockchain platforms are slow when it comes to performance and scalability. They would be unwieldy at best and unusable at worst for large scale governmental elections.

Secondly, the public nature of many blockchains raises issues around voter anonymity and privacy, which are fundamental properties of the democratic process.

Additionally, the decentralised nature of many blockchains is at odds with the governance model of elections, in which Election Management Bodies (EMB) are singularly responsible and held accountable for validating election results and verifying the integrity of end-to-end electoral process.

Finally, it is worth noting that blockchain on its own does little to contribute to security of the online voting process. To achieve fully secure, provable online voting requires a range of additional processes and technologies, such as verifiable end-to-end vote encryption as well as other logical, physical and procedural security processes.

That said, ongoing research will solve many of the early-stage performance and privacy issues, and we believe that as the technology evolves, it will play an increasingly important role in elections. Our research team are very much at the forefront of these problem-solving efforts and are members of a European Union Horizon 2020 funded research project (PRIViLEDGE) which seeks to solve the issues of voter privacy whilst still harnessing the immutable and integrity proving properties of blockchain.

We will be presenting our current thoughts on the use of blockchain in online elections at the E-Vote-ID Conference in Bregenz, Austria in October.

But if you can't wait that long, you can get an early overview here....

Thanks for reading!