Only 56% of the US voting age population cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election. Collecting data from presidential and mid term elections between 2002 and 2016, the youngest voters, between 18 and 29, turn out in the lowest rates, just 47% for presidential elections and reaching as low as 17% in mid terms. This is not entirely political apathy. A quick look at any social media platform will reveal partisans on both sides of the aisle, vigorously debating pretty much every policy issue we face. It's not apathy, it's the friction involved in the process, a friction I have come to know first hand.
Nine million votes are cast from overseas, about 6.5% of all votes tallied in the 2016 election. While in California earlier this year, I registered with the Secretary of State for an absentee ballot to be delivered by email. Now here I sit, a week before the election and I have still not received my absentee ballot. I could attempt to use the Federal Write-In Absentee ballot, but the last email I received from the state mentioned that I needed to mail in my ballot four weeks prior to election day.
Voting process friction is not the only issue. Voter suppression is a far greater concern. This can often be done through voter purges or poll closures which create voting conditions in favor of the political party making those decisions. A transparent digital system of voting would not only help reduce friction for expatriots, voter suppression would become dramatically more difficult, with attempted purges leaving clear trails and poll closures no longer a concern.
Many of us are expecting a blue wave to sweep through the U.S. on November 6th, but those frictions, accidental or intentional, may depress turnout and skew results. Even with a successful blue wave, having such a gap between possible and actual voters means that our government is not acting in accordance with a true democratic majority. Our democracies are long overdue for a technological upgrade to their voting process, one that is built built for a modern, globally connected and mobile world.
So how will I be able vote from my apartment in Paris when my passport still reads U.S.A.? The blockchain technology behind Bitcoin may play a very important part.
One of the biggest issues around digital voting is the concept of vote scarcity. One person should not be able to vote multiple times. This becomes a much bigger risk than a single individual accidentally voting twice. Nation state influencers like Russia may seek to manipulate our election outcomes. They need only impersonate a few hundred voters here and there to swing tight races. The 2016 presidential election famously swung on a total of 80,000 votes in three key states.
Ensuring digital scarcity has actually been a problem for many years. The music and movie industries had issues with this, as it was basically impossible to stop someone from creating a copy of a file and sharing it online with a few hundred thousand of their closest friends.
This is where Bitcoin comes in, as the very first digital asset that has true scarcity. It is essentially impossible to counterfeit Bitcoin. The innovation that enables this feature is a transparent, distributed ledger called the blockchain, and a consensus mechanism that requires a real world scarce asset, electricity, to be spent to validate legitimate transactions. What does that mean for voting? It means the same technology and principles of Bitcoin, which is a scarce asset that most closely represents money or gold, can be applied. Digital voting can be done on a transparent ledger, in real-time, over the internet, from anywhere in the world, with voting scarcity that is unhackable, with the right blockchain. That’s correct, no more risk of foreign hackers secretly adjusting things to suit their government.
How do we actually apply this technology to the real world? I sat down with two companies, Voatz and Democracy.Earth, who are leveraging this technology to make transparent digital voting a reality.
Voatz is a digital voting platform that combines smartphone biometrics, ID verification and blockchain to create a secure and streamlined experience. They have worked with 34 elections, including Tufts university, where they saw a voter turnout increase of 100% on student body elections over the two years the university had been using the system. And for the 2018 U.S. midterm they are piloting their system in West Virginia, permitting overseas voters to participate by mobile phone.
Hilary Braseth, the Director of Product Design & Communications at Voatz, shared how things are being done in West Virginia.
We have worked with major state political parties, local towns and cities, internal conventions for political parties and universities. What really sets us apart in the market is the combination of biometrics, ID verification and blockchain. While the process for how Voatz works typically depends on the needs of the election administrator, here is how it is working in West Virginia. Overseas voters register to vote as an absentee through the federal voter assistance program. For most options, people can choose mail, email & fax. In West Virginia, people can also request a mobile ballot. If mobile ballot is chosen, Voatz sends an invitation to the user to download the application on a smart phone. Not all phones are secure, so the application only works with certain smart phones we deem secure enough.
Once you download the application, you sign up with an email and phone number, which checks whether a person with matching information has registered to vote within the state, then it links your identity to your device. Next, you take a photo of your ID and a live selfie, which requires blinking eyes, and looking up and down to make sure you are a real person. Once the selfie is matched to the ID and the ID is matched to the email and phone number, your personally identifiable information is deleted on Voatz and you are able to access your account with a biometric key, such as a thumbprint or a facial scan. Forty five days prior to the election date, the voters receive their mobile ballot, which is designed to look and feel exactly like the ballot a voter would receive on election day. Along with this ballot are blockchain-secured tokens. The user gets one token per each candidate on the ballot. After you make your voting decisions, you validate your answers with your biometrics, the vote tokens are debited from your account, and credited to the candidates of choice.
Leveraging blockchain-secured tokens, Voatz is able to ensure that there will never be more votes than there are registered voters. Just like with Bitcoin, the transactions are all pseudonymous, and the manner in which Voatz handles your identity makes your choices anonymous to anyone looking from the outside.
When I had previously written about Voatz, they were leveraging the most secure blockchain, Bitcoin’s blockchain. For the West Virginia pilot, they are operating a permissioned blockchain built using the Hyperledger Framework, with about thirty known nodes, or vote validators, made up of different stake holders, such as the Secretary of State, universities and members of different political parties. We are about to see the first U.S. citizens voting through a blockchain-powered mobile application on November 6th. I can’t wait to see the results.
Democracy.Earth is an interesting and ambitious solution that takes a very different approach on modernizing the voting experience. The 501c3 non-profit company came out of the globally renown startup incubator, Y-Combinator, in 2015 with the goal of creating a new kind of democratic system which involves liquid democracy, a hybrid system between a representative and direct democracy. I spoke with Santiago Siri, CEO of Democracy Earth, to learn more,
I am originally from Argentina, a country with lots of corruption and inefficiencies within it’s economic system. My discovery of Bitcoin in 2011 was love at first sight. Finally there was an ability to escape the financial system of my country, to use tools that compete with the corrupt tools of my government. Democracy.Earth started in 2012, when I created a political party called “Partido de la Red” or the internet party. The goal of this party was to try to connect the internet with democracy. Candidates would vote according to how citizens vote online. We began researching how to do this, realizing that the technology behind Bitcoin would be crucial for this. In 2015, we were invited by Y-combinator to move out of Argentina and tackle the problem of digital liquid democracy from a global perspective. Democracy.Earth focuses specifically on the intersection of blockchains and voting systems.
In 2016, we piloted a use case for Colombian expats to vote on whether to make peace and reintegrate FARC back into society. We allowed for a simple Yes/No vote as well as Yes/No for specific items on the agenda. While society as a whole voted no, we were able to pin point the exact measure in the peace agreement that was the deal breaker, being that the FARC would be able to establish it’s own political party within the current columbian government.
On November 15, we will be releasing our flagship Sovereign platform, which is an open source software that allows pseudonymous social media participants to discuss political issues and vote on both mandates and candidates for all types of governing bodies. One thing we have realized is that the internet is no longer compatible with the nation state. The influence of Facebook on the outcome of an election is unmistakeable with the influence that fake news and Russian propaganda has had in the past. While governments currently take a hostile stance about how social media affects voters, we want to embrace it.
Democracy.Earth wants to create a digital governance model that connects the influence of social media with the direct ability to vote, all while protecting the identity of individuals and ensuring that no bots, AI or fake accounts are able to penetrate the network.
How does it work?
The first thing you need is a digital identity. With Sovereign, you will never need to reveal anything about yourself directly onto the network, such as an email, a birthdate or a phone number. All you need is a public address with a correspondent private key to sign transactions. To obtain a unique identity, that wallet will need to receive a token that uniquely represents that identity, in our case, a non-fungible ERC-725 token. In order to get that token, it must be proven that the public address belongs to a living human and that this living human does not have access to any other ERC-725 tokens. This cannot be done through computers, as computers are only able to identify trends or patterns, not other human beings. To ensure that the system does not have bots, we need to leverage our perception of each other. This means we will have a consensus mechanism involving votes by real humans on the generation and distribution of ERC-725 tokens.
Once you have your unique identity, you are able to vote. From a vote administration perspective, there are on-chain and off-chain votes. On-chain votes are expensive, but incorruptible. Votes are signed transactions with your public key which are then published onto an immutable, public blockchain. Off-chain votes are more scalable and less expensive, but are less secure. This is done through a proof of stake mechanism, where a cryptographic message is signed by your private key and weighted by the amount of stake you have. This signed signature can then be used on any application off chain.
From the perspective of the user, we provide the liquid democracy model. What this means is that people can vote on the voting measures directly or they can delegate those votes to someone else, whether it be a candidate, an organization, a community leader or even a friend.
In the upcoming November 6 elections, the number one worry on everyone’s mind is voter turnout. A new model for vote delegation has the opportunity to greatly increase voter turnout. Instead of not voting because of lack of knowledge or lack of time, people can assign their voting power to people they believe in while having the freedom to take back their vote or assign that vote to another person at anytime.
But why stop there? Instead of thinking about how we can apply blockchain to the current way we vote, maybe we should think about how we can leverage blockchain to make it better? Why can’t we delegate our votes on a finer grained scale? Why do our votes have to be once every two to four years? Why can’t we decide to vote more directly on the measures being introduced?
Perhaps we need an infrastructure upgrade that goes beyond our current election process.
A previous version of this article previous mentioned the phrase "IBM's Hyperledger Framework". IBM contributes to an open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation called Hyperledger Fabric. The phrase "IBM's" have been removed.
