So we've been using paper ballots since the birth of Jesus.
2000 years later and
things haven't really changed.
So what if we found a faster and easier way to vote?
What if we voted using blockchain?
On today's CoinMarketCap episode
we explore the benefits and drawbacks of blockchain voting and examine
some real world trials of it.
Make sure to check the time stamps down below to easily navigate this video.
My name is Trev and let's just get right into it.
Could we use blockchain voting for national elections?
Voting is considered a civic duty for people
who live in democratic societies. And it's
often referred to
as the cornerstone of democracy.
The citizens of ancient Greece
were among the first to elect their leaders through a vote.
But rather than using paper ballots
as we do, each citizen would place a pebble in an urn.
That represented the person that they thought should lead.
So how would a blockchain based voting system work today?
So far, there has not been a national election
run entirely, using a blockchain voting system.
So we can only guess how it might work.
Let's imagine that we are transported
eighteen years into the future to the Presidential
Elections in the year 2040.
The government has developed a blockchain based voting system that allows
all citizens to vote in any election from local council votes
all the way up to the national one from an app that works on all smartphones.
Your phone buzzes
with an alert, reminding you to vote in today's presidential elections.
So you log into the app and request a digital bailout.
The app then asks you for some ID to verify that you are eligible to vote.
Like a driver's license or passport. As well as a
short video of yourself saying a random
sequence of words to prove that you are
who you say you are.
Someone on the other end then checks your ID and video
and certifies that you are exactly the same person you claim to be.
Now that your identity is confirmed, your digital ballot arrives, so that
you can simply pick whichever candidate that you actually want to vote for.
And your vote is then written into the blockchain.
Later, you receive a receipt for your vote straight to your phone.
Which allows you to check that your decision
was registered correctly onto the blockchain.
And once everyone's vote is counted, the final count is available straight away.
And the digital ballots can be audited simultaneously by the relevant agencies
and regulators.
Obviously, this is a really simplified and purely hypothetical example,
but it should give you an idea
of what a blockchain voting system might look like.
In theory, a blockchain based voting system
could work in exactly the same
way for referendums,
opinion polls and national elections.
Let's talk about some real world use cases of blockchain voting.
Numerous blockchain voting companies have emerged from the commercial
sector in the past few years.
In fact, according to data from Pittsburgh, a $420 million
has been invested in the 27 election tech startups since 2016.
Let's take a look at 3 of them.
Number one is Voatz. West Virginia during the midterm
elections in 2018 the state of West Virginia successfully
recorded 144 votes from
military personnel stationed overseas in 24 countries.
The troops were able to
cast their ballots from their mobile phones
using an app developed by a company called Voatz. To vote using the app
each military personnel had to input their phone number,
some kind of ID and a selfie, which was compared with their I.D.
and a thumbprint. Once their I.D. was approved,
they then received a secure token that allowed them to cast their vote.
Both received a lot of positive
reactions from overseas voters once the voting had finished.
When asked for feedback, the military voter said:
The registration and I.D.
verification process
was easy
and overall, voting via a blockchain biz app had made the whole process
much easier for them.
One military voter said:
I've been living in Japan for 17 years and I've missed a lot of stuff stateside.
The system gives me an opportunity to engage again and with so much ease.
Thank you for your help. I just voted successfully.
Once the election ended, the Secretary
of the State of West Virginia, Andrew Warner, released a statement saying:
This is the first
In the nation project that allowed uniformed
service members and overseas citizens
to use a mobile application
to cast a bailout secured by blockchain technology.
Some hackers tried to disrupt the election,
but officials said the attempt was not close to being successful.
Since the West Virginia vote,
a number of state legislators and conventions have used votes
for other elections as well, including the Utah State GOP Convention,
The Arizona GOP convention,
The South Dakota GOP Convention,
And the Michigan Democratic Party Convention.
Were those trials successful? And is there a chance that the next U.S.
presidential election will use a blockchain voting system?
A trial with only 144 blockchain votes probably won't convince
many governments to start rolling out such voting systems.
However, a given that no
security breaches were found
and the feedback from voters were consistently positive.
It seems that blockchain voting isn't just a pipe dream.
And that brings us to number two, which is
Agora Sierra Leone. Agora is a company,
Based in Switzerland, tried
that's blockchain voting system during the Sierra Leone General elections back in 2018.
Agora's team counted votes from 280
polling locations across Western Sierra Leone and found that their votes
were very close to the official results.
Before we get into how Agora's system works,
we should point out that in Sierra Leone's election, Agora acted
as an impartial international observer.
And his blockchain voting system was used alongside paper ballots
as a sort of backup.
It was not treated as a primary voting system.
Even though the elections still use paper bailouts Agora system
still was actually useful because it posted
the ballots of the election five days before the official count was finished.
Also, elections in Sierra Leone are fraught with claims of fraud
and deception.
So Agora blockchain system
provided a kind of digital guarantee that
the results were in fact legitimate.
Additionally, Agora stored all the votes
on a public ledger. So voters could actually verify
that their vote was received and correct. Like votes
Agora system also allows you to vote from a digital device,
although this did not feature in the Sierra Leone election.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame blockchain voting
is being used in nonpolitical settings as well.
Since 2013, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has led music fans vote
for who they think should be the next act to be inducted into the hall.
The votes were carried out without so much as a hiccup until 2016,
when the number of votes jumped from 370,000
to more than 82 million in just four days.
About half of the votes went to a band called Chicago,
which eventually won. In reports from the Times suggests that the surge in votes
was probably the result of a boats designed to continuously vote
for one or two of the acts.
And following the upset, the credibility of
the Award of the Rock and Roll Organization
was called into question.
So the following year they partnered up with Votem,
a blockchain based mobile voting platform to ensure their next procedure was fair and free of boats.
Votem system worked behind Rock and Rolls user Interface, so that the fans would vote
for their favorite musicians as they usually would,
but their votes were actually being validated and stored on a blockchain.
And after the vote was finished without a hitch,
Votem CEO Pete Martin said: We are demonstrating
the power of blockchain voting technology in private elections
such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame vote,
where almost 2 million votes were cast without incident on the Votem platform.
Although voting successfully brought
transparency and more trust
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the company later clarified
that the system they used for this vote would actually not be
appropriate for democratic elections, as it could not comply with
the security requirements.
Reasons why blockchain voting might be a good idea.
Number one is that it's easy for us voting from anywhere.
Blockchain voting would be
faster and easier than voting in person. And the easier it is for
people to vote the more they will.
And also, voting through a blockchain based system would not require you
to vote through anywhere specific, like a poll booth.
Nor would you actually need
to go through the trouble of filling out and sending a postal vote.
And obviously having the option to vote from anywhere is an enormous help
to people who struggle to get to polling centres
like those who work long or unsociable hours, or who have physical disabilities.
Additionally, voting through an app is considerably
simpler and faster than filling out postal votes
for local, regional and national elections.
So blockchain voting systems
would be beneficial to military personnel living overseas as well.
And as we just mentioned in our hypothetical blockchain election,
counting votes stored on a blockchain
would take considerably less time than counting paper bailouts.
That's alive and auditable vote count would be available on election night.
Which would save us from a
week of impatiently waiting for the news to find out who actually won.
Number two is to dispel voter fraud myths.
Election results are commonly dragged into disrepute by the losing party,
the most recent of which, and obvious example, being the U.S.
presidential election of 2020.
The losing side claims that bailout
boxes were stuffed
with fraudulent votes for the other guy. Or that the votes
for their candidate were destroyed.
by devious members of their opposition
But statistically, voter fraud is essentially a non-issue.
Alison, Europe and North America.
A study by MIT found that instances of voter fraud
are just 0.00006% nationally.
meaning that they occur about
five times less frequently than being someone struck by lightning.
Yet in spite of the complete lack of evidence
for any widespread voter fraud,
People still do not trust paper bailouts.
One of the more common reasons for the lack of trust
is that you cannot check that your vote actually counted
because you put your bailout in a box or in the mail, and you just hope that
someone else makes sure that it gets to where it's supposed to go.
And if it doesn't, you'll never know.
The votes stored on a blockchain, on the other hand, are checkable,
and in fact you can view them at any time
and date of your vote almost as soon as you voted.
Blockchain votes could also be auditable, so impartial organizations and regulators
could check the legitimacy of any election without needing to count each vote
alongside the official vote counter.
Number three is
to increase public consultations.
Blockchain voting systems could allow governments
to quickly and easily gauge how the population feels about any issue,
from local problems, like filling in potholes
to national questions about defense spending.
In other words, blockchain could
radically reform the way
in which governments consult with their citizens.
And ensure that their citizens voice is actually heard.
And needless to say, this would be a huge improvement
on the polling systems that we have in place today,
which are complicated, expensive and imprecise.
Or a mix of all three.
Opinion polls are consistently relied upon to measure public sentiment,
but they are now and probably always will be notoriously imprecise
because they use the opinion of a few thousand people
to represent the voices of millions or more.
A referendum on the other hand
new perfectly records
how the population feels about one problem or another.
But they are incredibly expensive and time consuming to carry out.
The UK's Brexit referendum,
for instance, cost nearly £130 million to carry out.
But like we said earlier,
a blockchain based voting system can allow for a monthly or even weekly opinion
Polls or referenda.
On all the major issues.
Or just local issues.
In time it would also help more people to engage with politics
and feel as if their opinion actually matters,
which would probably lead to higher voter turnout and a stronger democracy.
Number four is to reduce election costs.
As we mentioned earlier,
Running elections is incredibly expensive,
especially when it comes to national votings and referendums.
A general election in the UK, for example, costs about £150 million,
which is around $190 million up to date.
And while building
and maintaining a blockchain voting system wouldn't be cheap either
in the long term, it would deliver significant cost savings, not to mention
all the trees saved by reducing the number of paper bailouts.
Going back to the UK for a second.
If the British Government decided to implement a blockchain based voting system
and it costs, let's just say, $350 million to build,
they would make their money back in just two election cycles,
and that's without accounting for any local election costs, opinion polls
or referendums.
So will blockchain voting happen any time soon?
As you can see, blockchain voting systems aren't just a nice idea for the future.
They exist.
They work.
And there's good reasons to actually use them for national elections.
However, trust in this technology
is not high enough to use at any time soon.
As the researchers from MIT here have pointed out,
blockchain security is not yet ready for use in national elections.
However, this does not mean that we cannot use blockchain
to certify elections while the technology develops and improves.
And as they become
faster and more secure over time, there is good reasons to
believe that blockchain could finally bring voting out of the Dark Ages.
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