Votes are a very important part of any democracy as they give their citizens the opportunity to participate in the democratic governance process. In a democracy, the goal of voting is not just the creation of a government, but a collective effort that fuels the interests of society and the economy.
The fundamental aim of global voting is to ensure that this is done in a fair and transparent manner. The traditional electoral system has been around for years, but it is now safe to say that it has outlived its time. The news has repeatedly identified challenges such as double votes, incorrect votes and privacy concerns in voting that demonstrate the inefficiency of the existing system.
In addition, the cost of organizing large-scale polls is expensive and time consuming. For example, India spent nearly $ 8 billion in its 2019 national elections and took about 40 days to complete the entire voting process.
Therefore, we can safely say that the traditional voting system has disadvantages not only in terms of security and time, but also in terms of the cost of seamlessly organizing the whole process.
Is internet voting the solution?
Can we then say that Internet voting is the solution to all of the problems that the existing traditional voting system is facing? Internet voting pilots were carried out around the world but stopped after a while.
Economic challenges such as the accessibility of the Internet, learning and the adaptation of the population to the new voting style can still be overcome with development and training.
However, the security risks (computer viruses / hacking) and scalability mechanisms are the ones that limit the pilot. Additionally, internet voting cannot essentially guarantee one vote per person, and the high cost of implementation further impacts implementation.
Is blockchain-based voting the solution?
Implementing blockchain technology for voting is definitely a good option as the decentralized consensus protocol ensures security up to a certain limit, which is more secure than the current centralized voting method.
But then certain challenges arise like:
- Scalability: Blockchains are not scalable today.
Only 15 transactions per second can be validated on the Ethereum blockchain. This means that as the number of voters increases, the blockchain voting will take much more time to complete the voting process.
For example, if the second smallest country in the world, Tuvalu, with a population of 10,600, plans to hold its elections on the Ethereum blockchain, it would take almost 11.5 minutes (10,600 / 15 = 706 seconds) to complete the entire voting process. However, given a country like India with 1.4 billion inhabitants, it would easily take three years to complete the entire voting process on the Ethereum blockchain.
Such time frames are virtually impossible to take into account in a large democracy.
- Power consumption: Blockchains use a lot more energy than any existing system.
For example, the Ethereum blockchain consumes 1.02 kilowatt hours per transaction. In a country like Tulavu, the energy consumption for blockchain voting is 10.8 megawatt hours, which will not have a significant negative impact on the environment. On the other hand, for a populous country like India, the blockchain voting, if done with Ethereum, will cost 1,428 gigawatt hours.
Not only are energy costs very high, they also have a negative (if not devastating) impact on the environment.
- Safety: While blockchains are secure, they are 51% vulnerable, with malicious nodes occupying 51% or more of the network. Since voting can change the state of an economy, the chances of hacking / fraud are very high.
- Identity: Existing blockchains cannot guarantee a completely decentralized identity.
How should blockchains protocols then be designed in such a way that they are scalable, secure and less energy-intensive?
- For scalability. Instead of all nodes validating all transactions, only a subset of randomly selected nodes can validate a transaction. In this way, the entire network can validate over a million transactions in a coordinated manner.
This is explained below with the hypergeometric distribution.
Only 200 randomly selected nodes are needed on a network to validate a transaction with 99.999999999% certainty.
- power consumption. The Proof-of-Work algorithm (HashRate PoW) developed in Bitcoin was to be replaced by a PoW that consumes less energy as only 200 nodes are required to validate a transaction. The order of energy consumption must ideally consume 3.6 billion times less energy than Bitcoin.
- safety. The hypergeometric distribution above shows that even with 90% malicious nodes on the network, only 200 randomly selected nodes are enough to validate a transaction. Therefore, the security of the blockchain should be higher: not 51% or 66%, but 90%.
Blockchain combined with biometrics
Blockchain technology in conjunction with biometrics is the ideal solution for the voting process. The blockchain protocol should of course be scalable, have only a few validation nodes, consume less energy and be highly secure.
Biometrics should also protect personal data, encrypt / decrypt data / messages, have tamper-proof authentication and comply with the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.
There are currently no players who have been able to effectively combine blockchain and biometrics to offer a solution for voting.
Given the challenges we discussed above, the truth is that if blockchain is to truly enable a seamless voting system for free and fair elections in this internet era, it must be combined with biometrics.
The debate and discussion will go on for a while as to how the internet and blockchain will ultimately disrupt or not disrupt the voting process. For example, a recent article published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory indicated that moving to blockchain-enabled voting does not eliminate the risk of error. Such a step can always get worse. Still, it is not impossible to declare victory in this area and keep our elections 100% safe and fair.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the sole rights of the authors and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Vishnu Priya Mishra is a blockchain enthusiast with six years of experience in advertising and marketing. She has worked with brands like Burger King, Xbox, and Ziff Davis in building brands and communities. She heads marketing and PR at Uniris.
Nilesh Patankar is an experienced technologist with over 25 years of experience in payments. He has managed global programs for Mastercard and Barclays. He was also the chief technology officer of Payback, the coalition’s largest loyalty program in India, which serves over 100 million users. Nilesh is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Uniris.
Akshay Kumar Kandhi is Head of Innovation, Research and Development at Uniris, where he is at the forefront of research in the field of blockchain and biometrics. He graduated from the École Polytechnique in France.
