Voting Corp, of California, has developed an e-voting procedure using blockchain technology. This was pioneered for student elections at the Swiss University of Lucerne in early December 2017.
The Company claims its e-voting process is more reliable than other existing online-voting solutions, for two main reasons:
- voting secrecy is guaranteed through an end-to-end encryption (along with an integrated decoupling of voter identity and the underlying vote – achieved through a cryptographic Mix-Net)
- the process enables voters to verify the integrity of their votes throughout the election – because their votes exist on the blockchain.
Voting and endemic e-voting issues
As other pioneers have discovered, problems exist with most e-voting solutions provided by third parties. Summarised, these are:
- insecurity (has the vote been counted correctly)
- no absolute anonymity of the voter (in e-voting systems administrators have access to sensitive voting data)
- hacker attacks usually remain undiscovered.
The consequence is that most online-elections (and surveys of third parties) are not reliable. This flaw exist with e-elections. It is not difficult to challenge results based on inherent design or process flaws.
e-voting and verifiability
Paper-based voting in a polling station allows independent observers to perform various kinds of verification, for example:
- voter eligibility
- one-voter, one-vote
- ‘un-modifiability’ of votes
- avoidance of ballot stuffing
- prevention of altering or removing of ballots
- correct tallying
With e-voting over the internet, many of the security assumptions above no longer exist. Yet, to ‘compete’ with paper-based voting, aspects of a vote must be verifiable.
In order for an e-voting system to be verifiable, a voter must be able to verify that his or her vote:
- has been cast as intended,
- was recorded as cast,
- contributes to the final tally.
To ensure the final result of a voting is correct, participants must be able to verify that the e-voting system:
- records and counts only valid ballots
- the valid ballots originate from eligible voters
- there is no alteration or removal of ballots
- the final tally is correct.
If an e-voting system satisfies these conditions it is universally verifiable. An e-voting system may be described as verifiable if it is both individually and universally verifiable. As such verifiability is a crucial property of an e-voting system, and it is demanded by more and more voters.
Ballot secrecy and use of blockchain technology
Voting Corp claims one key element of its e-voting system is how it delivers verifiability. Generally, e-voting systems rely on a public bulletin board (PBB) to achieve verifiability. Such a PBB must provide certain properties – like append only – which are non-trivial to achieve.
Blockchain technology, based on a public distributed append-only transaction database, offers exactly the properties needed for a PBB. Except that one obstacle is that only limited data can be written to the blockchain and at a cost of currently a couple cents per 40 bytes. Yet a vote requires roughly 20 Kbytes on the PBB.
The solution it uses:
- employs an internal hash chain on an internal PBB
- periodically submits a current hash to the blockchain, and thus anchoring the internal hash chain in the public blockchain.
The ‘unmodifiability’ of the blockchain used for the PBB increases the confidence in the result. In effect, blockchain characteristics ensure no malicious group of attackers can change the content of the blockchain unseen.
Voting as-a-service
Traditionally, e-voting systems need an election setup phase during which there is extensive and complex personal interactions between the customer and the administrator of the e-voting system. This involves installing the software, fixing election parameters and exchanging cryptographic keys.
Voting Corporation offers its e-voting system ‘as-a-service’ (which necessarily includes the properties above). Because so much is ‘built-in, the ‘customer’ (like the Swiss University of Lucerne) can setup an election via a web interface election.
One vital step in this is the implementation of a keypair and certificate generation along with their handling, storage, emailing etc. (Certificate generation in particular requires similar services to what certificate authorities provide today.)
What does this mean
Many view e-voting as desirable but impossible. The doubt surrounds the verifiability issues listed above. That does not mean e-voting is impossible. Estonia has had it for many years (though, ironically, Estonians prefer in person – treasuring their ability to cast a physical ballot).
Voting Corp’s solution, by introducing a blockchain and VaaS (Voting-as-a-Service), means elections conducted via e-voting should be easier to set up and authenticate. Though probably not suitable for national elections (yet) their applicability to (say) shareholder voting or even some local government is obvious. Better still, with increasing use, e-vote can build credibility as well as reduce the costs of balloting. This could be a win for voters and election administrators – and confidence in the results (just think of poor Honduras, among others).
This is also an example of blockchain potentially addressing what was previously regarded as insoluble.
