Going from bad to worse: from Internet voting to blockchain voting

The public is worried about election security — understandably, and perhaps more today than in recent memory. The news teems with reports of possible election interference by foreign powers, of unauthorized voting on the one hand and voter disenfranchisement on the other, and of technological failures calling into question the integrity of elections in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Some have advocated “voting over the Internet” or “voting on the blockchain” as promising ways to increase election security. This paper examines such claims, and finds them both wanting and misleading. Even taking into account the many imperfections of election systems in use today, Internetand blockchain-based voting would drastically increase the potential for catastrophic, undetectable, nationscale election failures. The intuitive appeal of online voting arises partly from the perceived convenience and accessibility of voting from a computer or smartphone. But studies have been inconclusive, showing that online voting may have little to no effect on turnout in practice, and sometimes even increase disenfranchisement.1 More importantly: any increased turnout associated with Internetor blockchain-based voting would come at the pyrrhic cost of losing any credible assurance that votes have been counted as ∗Researcher, MIT Media Lab, Digital Currency Initiative; J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School; and Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. †Ph.D. Candidate, MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) and MIT IPRI (Internet Policy Research Initiative). ‡Director of Digital Currency Initiative, MIT Media Lab. Institute Professor, MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). See, e.g., [28, 58, 63] and more discussion in Section 1. voters cast them, as opposed to undetectably altered or discarded. This is because electronic-only voting systems — including blockchain-based systems — will be highly vulnerable to catastrophic failures for the foreseeable future, given the state of the art in computer security. The bulk of this article’s analysis systematizes prior research about the security risks of online and electronic voting, and explains that these critiques apply equally to blockchain-based voting system proposals. The article also observes that blockchains may actually introduce new problems to voting systems, and provides a list of questions intended as a reference for critically assessing security risks of any new voting system proposals.