It is hard to get a grasp on the slow creep forward of the utilization of any new voting technology, especially when technologies are new and when they are unusual.

The use of the digital “distributed, decentralized, public ledger” known as blockchain technology has been spreading in many industries. Slowly, experiment by experiment, there have been attempts at testing how blockchain’s unique characteristics can be taken advantage of in the administration of elections.

Limited, local initiatives have shown that blockchain may have a real role to play. The latest news on this front comes from a really interesting article at United Kingdom-based New Statesman newspaper and was written by Simon Chapman based in Toronto, Canada.

Blockchain elections have already been trialled in several US jurisdictions, and there is clearly work to be done. In the 2018 US midterm elections, West Virginia used a platform called Voatz to allow internet voting for a small number of people, and other states such as Oregon have since followed suit. Security researchers from MIT later identified serious flaws in the system, and other trials such as the 2019 Moscow election have shown the system to be vulnerable to attack. However, Estonia, a pioneer of online voting, has executed several elections since 2015 without any major controversy.

Any system needs to be tested extensively to show that it can preserve the integrity of the votes cast and the secrecy of those ballots. This does not mean the principle of allowing better access to more openly verifiable voting is to be abandoned.

Another interesting new look at the changes underway in this field comes from Phil Goldstein at StateTech Magazine who recently published an article about how blockchain technology is working its way into America, finding a role in several different aspects of election administration and beyond. From the article:

Blockchain technology, in and of itself, cannot replace legacy systems for databases, record keeping or transaction management, but it can enhance such systems, experts say. Blockchain voting is also getting more attention, though cybersecurity experts are skeptical about it and it has not been tried in the United States on a large scale yet.

Most state government officials are still in a wait-and-see mode about the technology, though blockchain use cases continue to proliferate. According to a 2017 National Association of State CIOs report, 63 percent of those surveyed were still investigating blockchain in state government with informal discussions, 26 percent said there were no discussions of blockchain at that time and 5 percent had adopted blockchain technology in support of some state government services.

Be sure to also check out the Democracy Chronicles Election Technology section and our articles on Technology Dissidents, the Internet and Democracy or Voting Machines.