Improving Voting with Blockchain

The current conventional voting process/system has been in the news lately. The main concerns have been the lack of transparency, the lack of access, and the accuracy of the vote count. Whether these are all legitimate concerns or not is not the point, the lack of confidence in the system is. Mail-in votes can be altered or stolen, election officials can count inaccurately, and computers can be hacked. This research is to investigate the possibility of using the power of blockchain to solve these issues. When you hear of blockchain, people assume you are talking about Bitcoin or, “Isn't blockchain the same thing as Bitcoin?” “Isn’t this what criminals use?” Blockchain is one of the underlying technologies that enable the success of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. This research proposes to use blocks that record information about the ballots casted to connect them to each other in chronological order. This would create the chain of blocks. Parties now know the order of the votes and when the votes took place, thus exponentially increasing the difficulty of possible data tampering. The additional technology that is also used to enable Bitcoin with blockchain is allowing users to have public/private key cryptography. For you as an individual, you can see your vote, see if it was counted, but also remain anonymous so others cannot match your vote to you. The biggest advantage of utilizing blockchain is allowing the public to see their own individual verified vote and see the final counts in real-time.