Why We Need Online Voting + a compact upate on my activities
Blockchain-based online voting is no magic bullet, but if faith in the election process is to be restored, technology’s full potential must be used. Some people are already eligible for online voting. Why not roll it out?
The debate about election-integrity is not abating. Just last week the WSJ published a letter to the editor by former President Trump, in which he continues to allege voter fraud in Pennsylvania. Election-rigging is also at the center of Virginia’s Governor’s race. With the midterms coming up next year, now is the time to look at how technology can help to end such harmful disputes.
Every time elections get tight, the voting process itself is called into question. Whether it was allegations of non-citizens flooding polling places or fears about Russian election meddling in the 2016 US Presidential election – politicians have been adept at exploiting the complexity of mail-in voting, ballot counting and electronic voting machines. But the discourse over the last year has heaved the mistrust onto another level. Donald Trump’s rallying cry about a rigged election and the perpetually repeated claim that it was stolen endanger the democratic process itself.
Independent of Trump’s campaign, however, a considerable number of voters have been skeptical about election integrity for a long time. In 2018, according to the Pew Research Center, 27% of Americans felt either not too confident or not at all confident that ballots would be counted correctly.
Voter fraud is negligible, but…
In reality, verified voting fraud is extremely scarce in regions such as Europe and Northern America. An analysis conducted by Washington State on mail-in voting found only 74 votes to be questionable. Yet because of the seeming simplicity of manipulating a paper ballot, fear about corruption will always linger. The old paper-based logic has other drawbacks too. Ballots might be delayed, waylaid or simply lost on the way. Citizens without permanent addresses are excluded and mailing a soldier’s ballot from the deserts of Afghanistan poses a logistic challenge.
The importance of mail balloting has been blown out of proportion. In fact, 79% of all votes cast have no paper-trail at all. Hence the really alarming statistic is that 55% of voters think the election systems are vulnerable to hacking or other technical threats. Electronic voting machines have been an attempt to benefit from new tech, but they are fraught with difficulties. Without paper, there is no audit trail, which nurtures mistrust. Voters reported their pick being switched on screen, a failure attributable to software bugs. Hacks have not been reported, but the underlying legacy infrastructure and often missing security updates entice would-be attackers, which has grown into a critical problem in today’s age of cyber warfare.
The case for online voting, i.e. casting your ballot via a computer or smartphone, is clear. It would counter voter suppression attempts at the polling stations and increase the turnout of voters whose work or health condition prevents them from waiting in line for hours. Taxpayer dollars would be saved by cutting infrastructure costs, and discussions about delays in the results would be obsolete.
Is it really safe?
But with all the current challenges within the ballot box, how can vote-casting move to your computer or smartphone? The answer is that today we have a technology called the blockchain, guaranteeing unprecedented IT-security levels in the backend. Best known for powering cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, the blockchain-mechanism offers a de facto immutable record on a distributed ledger, with any manipulation attempt immediately visible. Nobody could claim their ballot lost or stolen.
On the other hand, this feature of the permanent record has stoked concerns about the anonymity of votes. This is unnecessary, because it is possible to check whether a vote was cast, without having to reveal for which party. Only because bitcoin works with a setup in which transactions are publicly visible, it does not mean other blockchains cannot be parametrized differently. Banks, for example, must keep monetary transactions hidden from the public eye. Hence, they resort to private and centralized blockchains, a variant that only allows predetermined computer nodes to see who performed a transaction or cast a vote. For whom the person voted can be rendered invisible in elections, for instance by using pseudonyms.
In 19 US states and the District of Columbia certain groups can mail their vote via e-mail or fax at national elections. Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and North Dakota offer a web portal, while West Virginia was the only state in the 2018 midterms allowing mobile app voting backed by blockchain technology. Several blockchain election pilots have been completed in the US, mostly allowing military personnel stationed abroad to cast their vote.
The news that West Virginia ditched the app in 2020 seems discouraging at first. Voatz, the provider of the voting app, was not able to resolve doubt about their security levels, nor willing to give access to its source code and auditing results. On top, cryptographers have been skeptical about the security of online voting in general. Yet they don’t take issue with the tabulation mechanism done by the blockchain. Municipal elections in the city of Denver and Utah County have served as blockchain pilots too. Auditing Denver’s election, the National Cybersecurity Center concluded that all votes in the pilot were cast and counted correctly.
It will take more than blockchain
The troubling attack-vendors are off the grid, the most notable challenge being voter authentication. No matter how reliable your network security is, if voters’ identity can be faked, the system is flawed. The West Virginia pilot used biometric features. Voters had to take a selfie-video in addition to a picture of their passport or driving license. This was a convenient way, but not the most secure. Estonia, a pioneer that has been using online voting since 2005, mandates people to input their national ID-card number as well as a PIN code, a highly reliable identity check.
Moreover, malware might already be on the voter’s device. Yet these are risks that can be mitigated, for example by disconnecting ballot-receiving computers from the network, by not accepting attachments, and by ongoing supervisions by independent organizations. Voters could also be required to scan their devices with a government-mandated app before being allowed to cast their ballot.
Blockchain alone cannot make online voting secure. Nor do we have mature voting apps yet. But this new tech solves the key problem of network security. To build an end-to-end solution that satisfies experts and dispels the public’s reservations, the government itself will have to work closely with private companies. It must build its own application, because licensing third-party software will not cut it. It is incumbent the government knows the source-code and can immediately close any emerging vulnerabilities.
So far decision-makers have erred on the side of caution when it comes to online voting. This is reasonable given that the legitimacy of democratic governments hinges upon secure, anonymous, and accessible ballot casting. But we must ensure to tap its enormous potential, even if it takes years to figure out and test all elements of the process. After all, digitalization has improved so many domains, from our personal life to the economy. It is time it also helps to bolster democracy.