A new dual-blockchain architecture promises to enhance election transparency, security and equity.
Computer science professor Kees Leune, PhD and student at whiteboard.
For a democracy to function, public faith in elections is critical. Voters must believe that all votes are counted fairly, yielding a legitimate victor. But the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election shows that many Americans question the security of our voting systems.
Kees Leune, PhD, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at 糖心破解版, believes that doubts about election security can be attributed in part to the limitations of commonly used voting machines. 鈥淲hen you put things in computers, transparency is harder because people don’t understand鈥攐r trust鈥攃omputers,” he said.
To address this skepticism, Dr. Leune partnered with Honors College alumnus Jai Punjwani ’18, now a software engineer at Bloomberg, to develop new technology that could make electronic voting both more transparent and more secure. The secret? Blockchain technology. The two shared their research in the article 鈥淓nhancing Electronic Voting With A Dual-Blockchain Architecture,” which appeared in the cryptocurrency journal听Ledger听in February 2021.1
According to the authors, blockchain is ideal for electronic voting systems because it offers security without a central authority. 鈥淵ou can think of blockchain as a large ledger, a book of transactions that cannot be manipulated,” Dr. Leune explained. 鈥淥nce something is written down on a blockchain, any tampering with that data will fail, which makes it an immutable electronic ledger. Blockchain uses all kinds of cryptography to prove that messages have not been tampered with. It is 100 percent secure.”
Because many skeptics of election integrity are suspicious of the organizations and institutions that run and verify elections, blockchain’s second improvement on existing technology is crucial: Blockchain does not have to be centrally managed. 鈥淭here is no central agency that checks all the data on the blockchain,” Dr. Leune said. 鈥淚n our system, the process of validating the results can be made public and shared with independent auditors.” In theory, then, each citizen could individually verify the results of the election. The system also offers independent auditors the ability to validate results without compromising voter secrecy, accomplished through the use of two discrete blockchain ledgers. 鈥淥ne blockchain records the fact that you have voted. The second blockchain records the vote itself. Those are kept separate, so it would be impossible to see who voted for whom.”
Although independent auditing can validate the results after the election has concluded, Dr. Leune and Punjwani’s 鈥渃onsensus algorithm” prevents fraud from occurring in the first place. 鈥淭he consensus algorithm is the process by which all the machines involved determine that each part of the voting process is done properly,” Dr. Leune said. 鈥淲hen I cast a ballot, the consensus algorithm will make sure I have filled it out correctly. For instance, did I select too many candidates? Only if all criteria are met will the algorithm allow a vote to be recorded on the second blockchain. And if I try to vote a second time in a different location, the consensus algorithm will see the entry on the first blockchain that says I have already voted.”
As promising as a blockchain-based voting system appears, however, Dr. Leune cautioned that no technological innovation can serve as a panacea. 鈥淎ny system exclusively on an electronic record is likely to fail,” he stressed. 鈥淭here should always be a paper trail somewhere so that results can be verified.” Even so, he hopes to improve upon his prototype with further research and innovations, in part by revisiting its assumptions.
鈥淛ai and I assumed that we can always unambiguously identify the person who is trying to vote, but obviously that’s not always the case at polling places,” he said. 鈥淲e also assumed this technology could only be used in machines at polling places, but we’d like to be able to improve accessibility. Someday, perhaps anyone with a computer will be able to vote anywhere in the world.”
1 Leune, Kees, and Jai Punjwani. 鈥淓nhancing Electronic Voting With A Dual-Blockchain Architecture.”听Ledger, vol. 6, 10 February 2021.