Blockchain Technology May Help Secure Voting Machines in the Future

Today’s voting machines are incredibly vulnerable to hacks and interception.

Such apparatuses have been in use for decades without any major updates to the managing mechanisms of the system.

That could all change, thanks to distributed ledgers. Blockchain Technologies Corporation (BTC), a group that specializes in cryptocurrency software technology, plans to implement a new way of voting, using the same system that powers bitcoin transactions.

If approved, the machines will forego the need of a central database to process votes. Instead, a network of computers will be able to secure the authenticity of a vote, making it valid and binding.

“Blockchain technology can provide untamperable audit trails, but it doesn’t solve the hard problem that erroneous or malicious software in the voting machine may cast votes other than how the voter intended, and the voter will never be able to know,” said Jeremy Epstein, senior computer scientist at SRI International.

So far the proposed system has been tested by the Liberal Alliance in Denmark and the European Pirate Party. BTC is currently creating an actual machine that can facilitate the new process.

Under the new system, the voting steps will remain unchanged. Individuals still have to register before entering a ballot during election. The only difference is that after a vote is casted, it is scanned by the machine, which looks for three identification marks in the form of QR codes.

“As the votes are scanned into the machine, each [vote unit] is transferred to the appropriate candidate. Each candidate has a unique address, also called a wallet, which is how the machine knows where to send the votes,” wrote Alyssa Hertig from Motherboard.

People will also be able to check on the status of each candidate using a blockchain explorer.