Can blockchain fix voting – and vice versa?
Democracy faces a host of challenges, and that includes voting itself. Voter turnout is falling – in the UK, it fell to 67% of eligible people in the 2019 general election, down by 1.5% from 2017. And that was before the pandemic hit. With the looming US election, casting an in-person ballot has some worried about the potential risk of queuing at a polling station and others more worried about the impact of the most vulnerable voters deciding to stay at home. Mail-in ballots are one answer, but the chaos surrounding the US Postal Service (USPS) has many concerned.
E-voting is often suggested as a solution, and has been trialled in Estonia with some success, but digital polls are haunted by security concerns. Could blockchain be the answer?
The digital ledger at the core of Bitcoin, blockchain has emerged as a hyped technology in its own right, offering a decentralised way of holding pieces of data that are hard to change. Once data has been written in a block, everyone on the blockchain has to agree to change it, which makes it potentially useful against fraud.
However, despite the many headlines proclaiming a new use for the idea – from tracing coffee beans for Starbucks to a game called – blockchain largely remains a solution without a problem to solve. Could e-voting be blockchain’s
