U.S. President Donald Trump discusses the announcement by Democratic presidential candidate, former … [+]
As news of Trump trying to shut down the United States Postal Service (USPS) and stall mail-in voting captures the headlines, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today made public a patent application from the USPS titled ‘Secure Voting System’ that describes using blockchain technology to secure mail-in voting.
The application is reported as filed on February 7, 2020, and the invention is described as, “A voting system that can use the security of blockchain and the mail to provide a reliable voting system. A registered voter receives a computer readable code in the mail and confirms identity and confirms correct ballot information in an election. The system separates voter identification and votes to ensure vote anonymity, and stores votes on a distributed ledger in a blockchain.”
Chief among Trumps’s complaints against mail-in voting are doubts about whether or not the person whose name is on the ballot actually cast the vote, and whether or not the ballot was tampered with after it was sent. In both instances blockchain offers tantalizing possible solutions. Blockchain identity services are already being widely developed and by moving the vote to a shared, distributed ledger, the votes would transmit almost instantly, drastically reducing the ballot’s vulnerability to tampering. The Postal Service had no comment at the time of publication.
One of several images illustrating the patent application by the U.S. Postal Service to use … [+]
The patent application provides a number of illustrations as to how blockchain technology would secure voting, including the one above. The USPS says in the patent, “Voters generally wish to be able to vote for elected officials or on other issues in a manner that is convenient and secure. Further, those holding elections wish to be able to ensure that election results have not been tampered with and that the results actually correspond to the votes that were cast. In some embodiments, a blockchain allows the tracking of the various types of necessary data in a way that is secure and allows others to easily confirm that data has not been altered”.
Paul Madsen, Technical Lead at Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed ledger technology invented by Dr. Leemon Baird, commented on the application by the USPS by noting, “Blockchains, or more generally Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), fundamental value is that they can provide to a community with potentially adversarial members a trusted and shared view of data without relying on some single provider to control that data. To do so, they first allow the community to come to consensus or agreement on the order of transactions that change the data.”
Madsen explained these functions could be useful for recording votes in the election, explaining, “Both functions could be useful for recording the votes in an election – as proposed by this USPS patent. The votes of individual voters would be recorded, either on the blockchain or effectively timestamped and then recorded elsewhere – and so both help to mitigate the risk of double voting, or vote manipulation as well as give the voter confidence through transparency of the process.” Madsen makes clear that, “blockchains are no magic bullet for voting platforms,” and identifies the identity verification as the more critical component, something which he indicated the patent also acknowledges.
Blockchain technology was utilized at the Utah Republican Convention as well as in Arizona to send delegates to the Republican National Convention after each State decided to hold their conventions remotely. The technology was used in the 2018 West Virginia elections for absentee ballots of overseas military; however, a report by MIT showed potential vulnerabilities of the vendor software.
The USPS Office of Inspector General (OIG) encouraged the Post Office to start looking at the benefits of blockchain technology back in 2016. Four key use cases for blockchain outlined in a report (image below) were 1) Financial Management, 2) Device Management, 3) Identity Services, and 4) Supply Chain Management. Identity services, an area the USPS could prove to be very strong on for some time, would play a critical role in securing mail-in voting by blockchain technology as well.
U.S. Postal Service’s OIG explored blockchain applications in 2016 with a report. Applications … [+]
References to patent filings by the USPS are also made in a 2017 report by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
The Postal Service is not alone in exploring the benefits of blockchain technology when it comes to voting – the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Select Committee on Investigations issued a report earlier this year that recommended blockchain technology for potential use in votes by Congress.