The election dance
Researchers have found that when a honeybee nest becomes overcrowded, scouts go off to find a suitable site for a new nest.
On their return, each scout performs a dance in the direction of its chosen site. As time goes on, some of the scouts stop promoting their chosen sites, and a few even switch to advertising another scout’s site. The swarm decides to move when all the scouts that are still dancing are advertising the same site.
The way politicians run campaigns and citizens decide who they want to vote in a representative democracy may be a bit different from the honeybees. Regardless of how it’s done, voting is an important instrument for collective thinking in any complex social structure. Even in blockchain, various consensus algorithms are employed to determine the next block.
Problems with existing systems
Elections are known to be cumbersome projects. Besides campaigning, the biggest pain points for election commissions and voters are the following aspects:
- Registration of eligible voters
- Casting of votes
- Counting of votes
These steps take days (or much more) to be executed, and are still ineffective. Take voter registrations for example. A Pew research paper published in 2012 reported that 52 million eligible US citizens, or about a quarter of the total, were not registered to vote. The report also stated that approximately one in eight of the registrations were invalid or inaccurate, and about 1.8 million deceased were still registered as voters.
After over 50 years of being independent and running democratic elections, India made a significant shift by adopting Electronic Voting Machines (EVM’s) in its elections for the first time in 1999. The battery-operated EVM’s are meant to make it easier to record and count votes, even in rural areas with unreliable or non-existent supply of electricity. But the EVM’s have repeatedly been criticized, with allegations (usually made by losing political parties) of tampering.
Security and integrity of the ballots is the reason why paper ballots are still used in most states in the US. Paper ballots are not susceptible to hacks, though the upshot is that disgruntled citizens spoil their votes by leaving them blank or writing names of mock candidates on the ballot paper. Reuters reported that over half a million votes, or 8.4% of total votes cast, in Cambodia’s general elections held in July 2018 were spoilt or invalid.
Can blockchain solve voting?
Attributes of a free and fair election include tamper-proof voting, verifiable audit trail, voter anonymity, and integrity of vote counting. These lead to a logical presumption that blockchain technology can tackle many of these requirements. As expected, there already are a few blockchain start-ups that are working to solve the inefficiencies of the ballot.
Voatz, a US-based start-up, used the HyperLedger framework to build its blockchain. HyperLedger is an open-source blockchain project supported by IBM and Linux Foundation. Its blockchain is permissioned, meaning that nodes (servers that store the ledger) need to be approved by an authorized entity (election organizers for example).
The 3-year old start-up reached a milestone in March 2018, when West Virginia used its platform to become the first US state in history to use blockchain in elections. Military voters were allowed to cast their votes using a blockchain-enabled mobile app.
In a statement made in August 2018, the management of Voatz boasted over 30 pilot election programs conducted till date, with over 75,000 votes cast. The company raised USD 2.2 million from VC investors in January 2018.
Votem is another start-up offering mobile voting software solutions. The start-up was launched with a USD 1 million from its CEO Pete Martin, and subsequently raised Series A funding from other investors. The company also raised funds through sale of its ERC20 (tokens issued on Ethereum’s blockchain) VAST tokens in February 2018. As per their whitepaper, election managers (such as state governments, corporations or private organizations) will utilize their in-house CastIron platform, using VAST tokens to access the platforms.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an Ohio-based museum, used Votem’s blockchain platform for its 2017 inductee votes. Votem reported that over 1.8 million votes were processed, with rock and roll fans voting from all 50 US states and over 100 countries. 60% of the votes were cast from mobile phones.
Votem’s website claims that till date, 8.2 million votes have been cast on their blockchains over 11 elections.
How blockchain voting works
Voatz’ whitepaper describes the mobile voting process on its blockchain. A voter can download the application on her smartphone. She would then register herself as a voter, using a combination of biometrics and one of her identification documents (such as driver’s license). In the West Virginia pilot program, military voters who qualified under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Act verified themselves by providing a government-issued ID with their selfies. Her identity would remain anonymous on the blockchain with a cryptographically generated key.
On election day, she would receive as many tokens as the number of candidates. The app’s front-end interface shows a typical ballot form that voters are used to. In the back-end, a vote is recorded similar to a blockchain coin transaction. The app allows the voter to “spend” one of those tokens, sending it to the candidate of her choice. Another way is to assign one token to each voter, so they could send it to a preferred candidate. This transaction would then be relayed to a dispersed network of validating servers, added to a block, and recorded immutably on the blockchain. The candidate receiving the most tokens would be declared the winner. The blockchain itself would serve as an auditable trail without revealing the voters’ identities, which can be verified in real-time.
Is inefficiency of paper ballots a necessary evil?
Just like the benefits, challenges with blockchain-based (or computerized in general) voting are easy to imagine. While Bitcoin’s blockchain itself is (for the time being) hacking-resistant, users relying on centralized points of contact, such as wallets or exchanges, are still exposed to the risks of hacking. There are similar risks involved with trusting a third party blockchain service provider, which may have cracks in its security infrastructure.
Also, using a permissioned blockchain like Hyperledger may not provide the same network resilience as the permission-less Bitcoin blockchain. A permissioned blockchain system typically engages a small number of servers (approved by the operator) that store the blockchain. This exposes the blockchain itself, if those few servers are attacked. Such an attack is unlikely on a permission-less blockchain stored over 1000’s of servers across the world.
Even before the votes are recorded on the blockchain, the devices or browsers being used to register and send votes could be exposed to malwares and other vulnerabilities, resulting in identity theft. This would be much harder to accomplish on a mass scale if the entire process is conducted offline.
A viable votechain? Awaiting results
Giving the flexibility to vote using smartphones may encourage more voters to participate. According to a 2016 survey of voting-age Americans, 33% of respondents said that they would be more likely to vote if they could do so over the internet. It would make it easier, for example, for the vast Indian diaspora to cast their votes and make their voices heard at national and state elections back home. It would also be much more convenient for international shareholders of a large listed company to vote on important decisions, without having to attend the AGM’s.
The more they like their chosen site, the more emphatically scout honeybees perform their “waggle dance”. The process can take several days, and it goes on till they dance themselves to consensus. Tech-sceptics say that foregoing efficiency for untainted voting is a necessary compromise. However, figuring out how to organize secure and transparent elections online might help increase voter participation in an increasingly connected world. This would have a positive impact on the quality of the results. Just like digitization of communication, banking, and even money, digitized voting is a distant but inevitable scenario. Governments should start small, and innovators need to battle-test their platforms and processes, before we can dream of skipping those long queues to the ballot box on election days.
It’s a great idea and will make it easier for couch potatoes to actually cast a vote!
The benefits of using blockchain for smart contracts and verifiable transactions can also be applied toward making business accounting more transparent. The Boardroom app, for example, provides a governance framework and app enabling companies to manage smart contracts on the public and permissioned Ethereum blockchains.