Is Blockchain Technology the Future of Voting?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: August 14, 2018 at 6:13:03 PM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Is Blockchain Technology the Future of Voting?
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Geoff Goodfellow.  DLH]
>
> Is Blockchain Technology the Future of Voting?
> Election officials are looking at ways to bolster security before the November midterms.
> By Nafeesa Syeed
> Aug 10 2018
> <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-10/is-blockchain-technology-the-future-of-voting>
>
> In Mac Warner’s 23 years in the U.S. Army, he experienced firsthand the hurdles of voting from abroad. “On a hillside 
> in Afghanistan, it’s hard to get mail, it’s hard to ship it out,” he says.
>
> As West Virginia’s secretary of state, Warner wants to help deployed service members to more easily cast a 
> ballot—only 20 percent of the state’s overseas military personnel voted in 2016. He also wants to bolster election 
> security.
>
> In the state’s primary in May, Warner got his wish. A pilot program enabling voting via a blockchain network allowed 
> his son Scott—an Army first lieutenant in Vicenza, Italy—to cast a ballot with his smartphone. “In the same amount of 
> time that I could’ve pulled up and watched a YouTube video,” Scott Warner says, “I actually got to go perform my 
> civic duty.”
>
> West Virginia is testing the new method, which uses blockchain technology to store and secure digital votes, at a 
> time of heightened concern about election meddling. U.S. intelligence officials warn that Russia could interfere in 
> the congressional midterms on Nov. 6, and on July 31, Facebook Inc. said it’s investigating interferenceon its social 
> media platforms, similar to that seen during the 2016 presidential election. At a conference of election officials in 
> July, cybersecurity dominated the discussions. The West Virginia experiment could help determine whether blockchain, 
> widely used in cryptocurrency, has a place in election security. But computer scientists say mobile voting is risky.
>
> The pilot program was funded with a $150,000 grant from Tusk/Montgomery Philanthropies Inc., a foundation set up by 
> venture capitalist and former Uber Technologies Inc. adviser Bradley Tusk. When he heard about Warner’s interest, he 
> asked one of his teams to research mobile voting startups. For the pilot, they picked Boston-based Voatz Inc.
>
> Tusk’s broader aim is to expand voter participation in the U.S. by enabling more mobile voting. (He served as 
> campaign manager in 2009 for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg 
> LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek.) “I have a 12-year-old and 9-year-old, and they would find it insane that you 
> couldn’t vote on a phone,” Tusk says. He wants to test mobile voting with groups such as the military, then find 
> officials “who are willing to try something different,” he says, to make the practice mainstream.
>
> Warner and his state elections director, Donald Kersey, worked with Voatz to make the app, which uses facial 
> recognition software to confirm voters’ identities, compliant with West Virginia’s laws. Votes were stored on the 
> blockchain, inside what Voatz executives call a “digital lockbox” on the cloud. On primary day, county clerks used 
> biometric authentication devices to unlock and collect the votes.
>
> Two counties, Harrison and Monongalia, ran the pilot in the May 8 primary. Because it’s so new, only a handful of 
> voters abroad used the app, according to Kersey. The blockchain technology distributes and stores the votes in 16 
> locations, including the cloud, using various providers. A hacker would have to get into all 16 locations to access 
> any of the votes, according to Kersey.
>
> Harrison County Clerk Susan Thomas says that because she couldn’t transfer the app votes into her tabulator, she had 
> to re-create the ballots before counting them. “There’s a lot that needs to be tweaked,” she says.
>
> Skeptics say blockchain voting won’t improve security. It’s “mostly hype,” says J. Alex Halderman, a University of 
> Michigan computer science professor known for hacking into voting machines. He says there are still core security 
> problems with mobile voting that blockchain doesn’t solve, such as preserving anonymity and transferring votes from 
> smartphones infected with malware. It’s “worthy of research and study—but it may be decades until we get there,” 
> Halderman says.
>
> These mobile systems also lack a paper backup, making it hard to audit vote counts, according to Audrey Malagon, a 
> mathematics professor working with the advocacy group Verified Voting Foundation. “I hope they recognize that this 
> isn’t ready for widespread use,” she says. Some West Virginia counties use only paper ballots; others have voting 
> machines that produce a receipt so voters can confirm their selections.
>
> [snip]
>
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