State of Blockchain-based Voting

I am on vacation this week and got a little time to look into things I am curious about and just haven't had the time to keep up to date on.?One of such things is blockchain-based voting.

Watching what's happening in Ukraine and other places, reminds how fragile democracies are, how easily the entire states (that are otherwise pretty advanced in all other areas) can be?manipulated and pressured into doing something that a dictator wants them to do.

At the end of the day, the only thing that can stop murderous dictators rising to power, or even something as mundane as running the city properly, are the free and fair elections. (I say that realizing that there's a lot more that needs to happen behind the scenes in order to even have good leadership choices in the elections, but that's another post for another day).

The reason I think of blockchain when I think of voting is that it possesses a lot of the features that one would want in a good voting system:

• Immutability
• Auditability
• Double-spend (double-vote) prevention
• Privacy
• Decentralization
• Smart contracts

A (correctly implemented) blockchain solution can provide the privacy that is so desperately needed in places where people fear retaliation (most of autocratic states).

A smart contract capability can raise the sophistication of voting to support performance-based re-election clauses, and support different voting methods like two-round (runoff), representation, or ranked voting. It can also provide a platform that can embed education on the issues at stake, which would in turn raise the quality of the elections.

So with that, I set out to see what's been done with blockchain voting to date. I expected to see quite a few experiments and a bunch of scientific papers that explored the subject. What I have found where just couple of real life experiments (Sierra Leone and Russia's capital mayoral election of all places(!)) and a decent but high level science paper from MIT .

MIT paper compares paper vs online (centralized) vs blockchain (decentralized) across criteria dimensions like evidence-based, secretness, software independence, voter-verifiable, contestability, and auditing. They predictably find that electronic (centralized) voting systems are just too (massively) vulnerable to be a real alternative to paper based voting. These concentrated systems provide a fertile ground to scalable attacks.

When it comes to the blockchain use in voting, the paper critiques the transparency nature of the popular blockchain, device and network security vulnerabilities, network throughput attacks, key management, challenges of permissioned blockchain with verifiability, but outlines a strawman with zero-knowledge proofs as a potential solution for secret ballots. It talks about the complexity and maintenance challenges that the open source blockchain software introduces. It then cuts short, ending in a series of questions that one would have to address in designing blockchain-based voting, such as threat modeling, security mechanism design, evidence approach, vetting and transparency, cryptography, credentials & PKI.

While I would agree that all of those have to be addressed, it seems like the solution shouldn't be that difficult with use of open source, semi-premissioned, zero-knowledge proof blockchain. Credentials and PKI could be government issued (centralized). The issue with node distribution has a wide range of solutions - from completely open and elective, to registered party owned, and number of options in between. It would of course have to be proven out and evolve over time, so it would make sense to start on small municipal level and work its way up.

I still have an image of thugs waiting around the polling offices and people not able to cast their votes for the fear of being prosecuted - it is real and present danger, and I'm troubled by the fact that no-one has stepped up to sponsor or spearhead a good blockchain solution. Would seem like an initiative that could fit in with Gates foundation, or something of that sort. Maybe a defense contract.

Anyways, if this feeble article by some magic chance sparks a butterfly effect, I will be very happy.

Image credit: generated with Pixray AI