Alex Tapscott wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which he said that “using blockchain technology, online voting could boost voter participation and help restore the public’s trust in the electoral process and democracy”. He’s wrong about this, and it’s got nothing to do with the blockchain. It’s because online voting is a bad idea, even if you did implement it with blockchain.
I wrote about this back in 2015, noting that politicians don’t understand the Internet (or, indeed, technology in general) and expressing some surprise that they don’t ask people who do (e.g., me) to provide some input to their plans. If, for example, the Speaker of our House of Commons had asked me about online voting back in 2015, I would never have advised John Bercow to say that people should be allowed to vote online in the 2020 general election (assuming the current government lasts that long, of course).
Alex writes that “as citizens, we can trust the outcome of such a voting system: voters can check the blockchain to verify that their vote was counted correctly” (as presumably could the person with a gun to the voter's head). And I can see how this might work: voters could look in a database to see that their vote was counted correctly, and then check some companion blockchain to see that the record concerning their vote had not been changed. But does this really help or would it just make voting under duress more common?
I remember discussing this at the Tomorrow’s Transactions UnConference 2015 when voting came up in a discussion session about about non-financial demands for identity and authentication technologies. I emphasised the point that voting online is a mad idea that doesn’t fix any actual problem, and I was hardly a lone voice. Let me stress that I was not saying that we could not use modern technology to improve the voting system. As I wrote the previous year, "we live in a Venmo world now, so if the under-30s want to vote using an app that tells their friends that they voted, or perhaps even how they voted, or perhaps allows them to add a funny picture or an acute comment, well so be it. But make it secure, and make them go down to the polling station to use it".
The guys and gals in that Unconference discussion session came up with a rather interesting idea: Democracy Monkey. Think Survey Monkey but with the strong two-factor authentication and appropriate Customer Due Diligence (CDD). The idea is this: make Democracy Monkey a public utility that can be used by central and local government for all sorts of public purposes and sell it to business so that they can use it for votes for shareholder meetings and such like. I also thought that it could be used for "Britain Hasn’t Got Talent", "The Why Factor" and "I Used to be a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here" and so on as a way to socialise the use of the technology.
We developed our plan using Chaumian blinded tokens as the core technology. The broad marketecture was that you use your gov.verify identity provider to register with the Democracy Monkey and to indicate which elections you want to take part it. The system sends you tokens for those elections at the appropriate time. The Democracy Monkey app on your mobile phone could store the tokens in a tamper-resistant secure element and then when you want to “spend” the vote you can run the app or tap to make it happen. For some voting, such as General Elections, you would be required to tap as that sort of voting is a public act, but for other voting (e.g., "Strictly Come Trampolining") you could use the in-app “spend” to vote remotely.
I still think this is worth a try and stand ready to answer the nation’s call should the powers that be decide to move forward. And if you want to store the destination of the blinded votes on a blockchain somewhere, that would deliver transparency and accountability so that’s good too.
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