Research & Whitepapers

Government Blockchain Association Voting Working Group Publishes Election System Standard

Published 2023

The Government Blockchain Association (GBA) Voting Working Group has reached a pivotal milestone in the quest for secure, transparent, and accountable voting systems by announcing the official publication of the BMM Voting System Supplement, a groundbreaking addition to the Blockchain Maturity Model (BMM) designed to support secure and trusted elections. This supplement is tailored to address the unique demands and challenges of blockchain-based voting solutions, covering critical aspects such as security, transparency, privacy, identity management, trust, accessibility, and legal compliance. It offers a blueprint for governments, election authorities, technologists, and stakeholders to build robust, secure, and user-friendly blockchain-powered voting systems.

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Education Series: Take Me Out To The Blockchain

Published 2023

The applicability of blockchain technology in elections is often misunderstood and misrepresented. This educational paper attempts to explain the technology at a very basic level.

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Progress Towards Creating Standards for Remote Digital Voting

Published 2022

On March 4, 2021, several elections experts representing a diverse set of opinions on the issue of digital voting were invited by the Government Blockchain Association (GBA) for a public discussion on the topic, moderated by Gerard Dache, Director of the GBA. Panelists included an election official, academics, industry associations, and a remote voting vendor. A second, follow-up panel discussion, hosted by the GBA, was held on April 26, 2021. The panelists agreed to collaborate on two documents, each of which analyzed certain issues surrounding the following seven main ballot delivery, marking, and return methods in use today.

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Parallel Internet and Paper Elections – a Practical PIPEline to Secure and Accessible Elections

Published 2022

Internet voting has the potential to expand the true democratic process in our country by making our elections more secure and more accessible. Voters with disabilities, active-duty military, first responders, citizens living outside the country, and citizens who are unable to vote due to unforeseen circumstances have benefitted tremendously from voting over the internet. The fundamental apprehension that has been used to delay the widespread adoption of internet voting around the worldis the notion that malicious actors could materially alter the outcome of an election and that their actions could potentially go undetected, thereby creating an unknown level of risk. Recent pilot projects have offered some practical approaches to significantly reduce this risk through a combination of voter verified receipts and citizen-led audits. In the event that a malicious act is detected, the process to correct results, if required, can still be complicated, depending on the jurisdiction’s rules and regulations. We propose a pair of solutions, which we believe to be reasonable: a Parallel Internet and Paper Election (PIPE).

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Fostering Trust and Trustworthiness in Election Infrastructure Using Trustless Technologies

Published 2021

A fundamental issue in elections management is the oversight of voter registration databases. Since registration records are digital, there is an increasing burden on IT staff to maintain and safeguard these systems and to securely interface them with other networks across the various states, territories, and counties. Increasing trust and trustworthiness in these systems is therefore critical, as inaccurate or insecure registration records increase the risk of an election being compromised by a malicious actor. In addition, IT staff can play an important and valued role in making registration databases more complete by identifying and contacting eligible, unregistered citizens. In Section 2, we discuss the two applicable issues at hand: election access and registration database integrity. Section 3 describes fundamental blockchain concepts and Section 4 provides further details on how blockchain technology can be used to identify eligible voters and also to assess the integrity of sensitive data, such as voter registration records, without compromising privacy. We give some security recommendations on the implementation of such a solution in Section 5 and make concluding remarks in Section 6.

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Ensuring Trustworthy Voting for Military and Overseas Voters

Published 2021

Almost four million active duty military and overseas citizens are eligible to vote absentee in U.S. elections. However, only about 7.8% of US citizens living overseas and 47% of military voted in 2020, compared with 79.2% among the domestic voting population. This paper gives statistics and representative anecdotes that describe the various challenges that overseas and military voters face when voting absentee in U.S. elections. In this paper submitted for the 2021 Summer Conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State, the authors propose to eliminate these challenges by allowing every absentee voter the option to vote from a secure mobile device. Furthermore, there is considerable demand for such an option. We also elaborate on the advanced privacy and identification features that enable mobile voting to be considerably more secure than traditional absentee voting methods. Legislation allowing a mobile voting option would have a profoundly positive impact on military and overseas voter turnout.

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Looking to the Future: A Renewed Call for Standards and Transparency for Access and Resiliency

Published 2021

Due to the widespread effects of the coronavirus pandemic, many voters were forced to depend on absentee ballots to safely participate in the 2020 United States Presidential Election. In the weeks and months leading up to Election Day, there were serious doubts about whether our nation’s electoral system was prepared to handle the rapid expansion of mail-in ballots under tremendous public pressure and with limited resources. Absentee voters were equally worried that their votes might not be counted. Several lawsuits successfully argued for expanded access to absentee ballots and the acceptance of ballots that arrived after November 3rd. In the end, Americans accustomed to having a definitive winner by the end of Election Day waited nearly a week for results, further degrading the public’s trust in our electoral system. We face a reckoning of the way our voting system currently works, with clear gaps in resiliency and access. The United States has historically led the world in technology adoption. However, when it comes to elections and voting, we are behind.

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State-of-the-Art Security Performs First-Rate Threat Mitigation in Convention Elections

Published 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our world, touching every aspect of our lives. Elections are no exception. This paper explores the emerging security datasets around the performance of the Voatz remote voting system while conducting virtual conventions in April 2020. During this time, the Voatz system processed a record 7,000 votes on its platform during a single election period. As a result, Voatz was able to collect a rich dataset of device and network level threat detection and mitigation events. This paper analyzes this dataset, the implications of the insights, and considerations for the applicability of mobile security for high-stakes industries, whether governmental, financial, or critical infrastructure related.

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Standardization of Remote Ballot Marking & Return Through A Rigorous National Study & Examination

Published 2020

The 2020 election cycle is creating a challenge impacting all who are interested in, concerned about, and enabled by our electoral system. Citizens, republican and democratic state election officials, states themselves, candidates, federal agencies like the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and Federal Voter Assistance Program (FVAP), and lawmakers in Washington without exception have a stake in a successful 2020 election.

The principle of one person, one vote in a private, secure system, is among the highest values enshrined in our nation’s democracy. Our entire voting system is being challenged by myriad factors, which include the persistence of the novel coronavirus and the national and personal economic fallout. These existential challenges are profoundly affecting state budgets, creating difficulty for converting polling-place voting systems to mail, and concern about our elections system’s overall fairness and effectiveness.

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Beyond “Security”: Addressing the Hidden Crisis in Our Elections

Published 2020

A quiet but mounting crisis threatens to undermine the integrity of the U.S. election system. It’s not the danger of foreign hacking and interference, though the threats are intertwined. Rather it is the dramatic increase in the cost of administering our elections, a figure which has surged since 2016.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise: Our election system has become the latest battlefront in the asymmetric warfare which is the hallmark of the 21st century, with our adversaries using relatively modest resources to cause disproportionate harm. Faced with resulting skyrocketing costs of protecting our political system, our leaders must fundamentally rethink how we conduct elections. We should employ a new vocabulary that captures the limits of security and emphasizes instead systemic resilience.

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The Road to Online Voting

Published 2020

The dream of online voting is as old as the Internet itself. The road to achieve that goal has been long, marked by high-profile setbacks and less-noticed but still important progress. It is a path marked with deep skepticism and loud, security-focused critics. It is a journey which we are not close to finishing. Yet, as the late Nelson Mandela is credited with saying, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

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Voatz Mobile Voting Platform
Security, Identity, Auditability: An Overview

Published 2019, 2020

Mobile voting is a much-needed, long overdue response to the challenges faced by an important segment of the American electorate: people whose circumstances make it impossible or inconvenient to vote conventionally. The Voatz Mobile Voting Platform adds a new, fourth voting method to the ways America’s electorate votes…This paper introduces security concepts and technologies that are widely used in other industries. It describes how Voatz has incorporated them into a new, resilient remote ballot marking system that addresses the three major security-related obstacles that have stymied progress in online voting: Security (device security, network security and secure storage of returned ballots), identity (identity proofing, voter authentication and binding), and auditability (voter-verified and transparent, jurisdiction run post-election audits).

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Remote Digital Identity
Technology for Mobile Voting & Beyond

Published 2019

The means to reliably establish the identity of citizens residing outside of their election jurisdiction has been an unsolved problem since the earliest days of elections. In 2017, theNational Institute forStandards andTechnology (NIST)publishedSP800-63-3 “Digital Identity Guidelines” for federal agencies seeking to improve the convenience of providing digital services to their constituents while maintaining the security of their IT infrastructure – problems faced by every election official. This paper “translates” the NIST technical guidelines for an audience of non-technical election officials who seek greater security in election administration and to improve the convenience to voters whose circumstances effectively prevent them from voting in person or by mail.

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Under the Hood: The West Virginia Mobile Voting Pilot

Published 2019

In 2018, West Virginia’s Secretary of State Mac Warner launched the nation’s first mobile voting pilot for UOCAVA voters. For the first time, on their own Apple or Android smartphone, an authenticated registered voter was able to receive, mark and submit a secret ballot of the correct style from virtually anywhere in the world. Every ballot submitted was encrypted and stored on a geographically distributed and redundant network of blockchain servers managed by the two largest providers of cloud infrastructure. Once stored on the blockchain, the voter could review his/her ballot, request that it be spoiled if necessary and vote a second ballot on his/her smartphone. At the close of polls, every ballot was printed at the county and tabulated on federally certified tabulation equipment. Post-election audits were performed on every ballot submitted by smartphones. This paper describes the Secretary’s goals, the lessons learned, and how the system worked under the hood.

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