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What is Blockchain? How does Blockchain Voting Work? Pros/Cons Case Studies
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Secure, online voting for the blockchain era.

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In an increasingly digital world, online voting is the next logical step in a modern democracy. As we begin to implement it into our existing systems, maintaining and ideally increasing election security will be of utmost importance. Election security is one of the most important elements of a fair and free election, and has become a topic of interest in recent times, especially with the 2016 U.S. presidential election that was interfered with by the Russian government. However, online voting has historically been vulnerable to an array of cyberattacks, which has made officials hesitant to integrate online voting into the U.S.’s current election systems.

One promising solution to the issue of election security in online voting is blockchain, a nascent technology that can potentially provide greater security through its decentralizing abilities. In political theorist Robert A. Dahl’s book Democracy and its Critics, one criterion for an ideal democracy is voting equality, or the ability for each citizen to have an equal opportunity to vote and have their vote be counted as equal to others. According to Pew Research Center, the U.S. trails behind most developed countries in voter turnout. Many do not vote is because voting is simply inconvenient for them, and many others are unable to vote because of malicious voter suppression. Both of these problems can be solved with online blockchain voting, making it accessible and easy for citizens to vote through their computers and mobile devices, and thereby having the potential to drastically increase voter turnout.

Blockchain voting can also be applied to political polls, which carry great influence in informing the public and determining the eligibility of candidates for presidential debates. Polls are highly susceptible to statistical flaws resulting from the composition of their sample populations or having a small sample size. With secure online voting enabled by blockchain technology, pollsters could get more accurate results through polls conducted through voting apps, aided by direct access to voters through the app.

What is Blockchain?

A blockchain is a distributed peer-to-peer ledger, meaning that there is no central database storing the blockchain ledger. Instead, a copy of the ledger is stored on many computers such that there is no single point of attack for hackers. Blockchains being “peer-to-peer” means that communications and network operations happen directly between users, without a central intermediary. A ledger is simply a record of all transactions that have happened on the network. Transactions stored in the ledger, called “blocks,” are cryptographically linked in a consecutive sequence. Blockchain was originally invented in 2008 by an anonymous person or team under the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” as the underlying infrastructure of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency. Although blockchain was originally invented to enable decentralized financial transactions, blockchain has since been applied to a variety of use cases and industries, such as real estate, supply chain, autonomous organizations, finance, video games, and many more. The core features of blockchain are security, immutability, and decentralization.





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How Blockchain Voting Works

On a computer, we can replicate files as many times as we want. This ease of replication becomes a problem when we want to send a unique, valuable asset, such as a vote or a token of currency over the internet. In fact, this is a classic problem in computer science called the “double-spend problem.” Bitcoin’s implementation of blockchain solved the double-spend problem using a validation system called “proof-of-work,” which requires a certain amount of computational work to be performed by the network validators to officially add a new transaction to the blockchain. For proposed transactions that are invalid or malicious to be permanently added to the blockchain ledger, the proposers must control 51% of the entire network’s computing power, which is economically infeasible. Thus, with a blockchain voting system, voters can only cast their single ballot, and their ballot is securely stored on the blockchain.

To verify their identities, voters would also have to upload government documentation to the blockchain, as well as some biometric data such as their fingerprint or face. Once the voter’s identity is verified, the system gives them a token that represents their vote, and they can securely send them to the digital address of the candidate that they would like to vote for. Votes remain completely anonymous, as government documentation and biometrics are only sent to the government for voter verification purposes. After successfully casting their online ballot, voters can check that their vote went through using a receipt code that is sent to their own digital address.

Pros of Blockchain Voting

Our current system of brick-and-mortar polling stations is antiquated and desperately needs to moved online, just like we’ve already done with shopping, music, and telecommunications. Voter apathy has caused participation to dwindle in recent years, and making polling stations inaccessible is one of the most common voter suppression tactics. Online voting would allow people to vote from anywhere and at any time, greatly boosting voter turnout. It would also make the entire process more convenient because online voting avoids the need for physical infrastructure, and machines can tally votes quickly and accurately.

The problem is that plain online voting has enormous security risks; this is where blockchain technology comes in. A key weakness of online voting is the “double-spend problem”—the prospect that individuals could cast their ballots multiple times for a candidate, made possible by the fact that a voter only sends a copy of their vote, but retains the original. In a blockchain voting system, a hacker would have to command 51% of the computing power on the network to cast the same vote twice. Moreover, blockchain’s distributed nature prevents hackers from altering someone’s vote given access to their internet connection, and voters can keep their identity and political preferences confidential.

Cons of Blockchain Voting

Despite the technology’s immense potential, existing blockchain voting systems exhibit several security flaws, including vulnerabilities to server penetration attacks, client-device malware, and denial-of-service attacks. All of the above disruptions involve infecting voters’ or the elections offices’ computers with malware. While tampering with paper ballots is only a one-at-a-time attack, malware attacks are an effective method for large-scale corruption, as they can easily propagate among nodes on the network.

Blockchain voting systems are also vulnerable to “collusion” attacks, in which participants with a combined computing power of 51% or greater collude to control the ballot set. They can then interfere with the election by substituting fraudulent ballots to the blockchain or altering existing votes. Despite the recent successes of blockchain voting among small groups of absentee voters, it is also unlikely that most current blockchain networks can handle the sheer volume of the general population.

Case Studies

In designing our product, we drew from the successes and failures of past pilots of blockchain voting, both within the U.S. and internationally.

Voatz, a Boston-based startup that has raised almost $10 million in venture capital, has been one of the most successful pioneers of blockchain voting. Its main draw is its utilization of the biometric security features on modern smartphones, including fingerprint readers and facial recognition-enabled cameras, to authenticate voters. Voatz claims that its app has been used in 54 elections to date, include a state election in West Virginia, a municipal election in Denver, and a county election in Utah County, both to collect absentee ballots from military service members and to allow disabled people to vote from home. However, election security experts and politicians have expressed concern about Voatz’s methods. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) even requested a government-led security audit of the Voatz app not long ago. Voatz claims that its app has been audited by two independent organizations, but has declined to describe the results of either. In fact, during the 2018 midterm elections in West Virginia, someone unsuccessfully tried to hack Voatz. Although the incident demonstrated that Voatz’s security system is—to some degree—robust, the company’s complete lack of transparency about audits makes it unlikely that people will trust Voatz enough to use its app in the upcoming 2020 elections.

In the U.S., 32 states allow various types of online voting for some subsets of voters, and more than 100,000 ballots were case online in the 2016 general election. However, the most comprehensive adoptions of online voting have been in other countries. In 2005, Estonia deployed Smartmatic’s online voting technology for use in local government elections, and online voting participation has now reached 44.4% of the population. Estonia’s system is called “i-voting” and takes place before election day, running until the fourth day before the election. Although it is not exactly blockchain voting, the success of online voting in Estonia demonstrates a clear desire to move away from paper ballots, one that is likely reflected in the U.S. In 2018, Sierra Leone became the first country to conduct a blockchain-based national election, supported by Agora, a Swiss blockchain startup. Blockchain technology successfully increased public confidence in the election’s results and reduced post-election arguments by losing parties.











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BlockBallot builds upon the successes of Voatz and other blockchain voting startups by implementing consensus protocols that significantly increase security. We pledge to remain a transparent company by scheduling routine third-party audits by trusted security firms and releasing detailed white papers about our internal processes. Maintaining the public’s trust in our system will be essential for governments to feel confident using BlockBallot in elections as influential as the U.S. presidential election. We have begun discussions with the state-level Democratic and Republican parties in Washington, Virginia, and Delaware, with the goal of rolling out BlockBallot for use by military service members and disabled people in the 2020 primary elections. Look out for notifications from your local government and join our email list in the “Contact” section to stay updated about our progress!

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