Blockchain and Digital Democracy

The role of technology in political participation

The Context of Digital Democracy

In recent years, the advent of social media and online communication platforms has radically changed the way people engage in ethical and political commitments, enabling the creation of social movements, mass mobilizations, and the rapid dissemination of information. However, this change has not been without criticism, with concerns about the manipulation of public opinion, misinformation, and the control of large tech platforms.

In this changing context, opportunities have arisen for the development of Internet voting systems (e-voting) for elections, leveraging digital resources.
These systems allow users to vote using computers, smartphones, and tablets, ensuring anonymity in compliance with citizens’ rights. One of the main advantages of e-voting systems is the possibility of achieving a fully verifiable election, allowing voters to check if their vote has been correctly counted.

Some nations already use electronic systems to vote at polling stations, but these are not always transparent in their operation. An example comes from Germany, where, after an analysis conducted by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), it emerged that many of these machines were considered unreliable and lacking sufficient security and verifiability, eventually being banned for parliamentary elections. This highlighted the problems related to the voting process and emphasized the need to balance accessibility and innovation with the security and integrity of the electoral process.

A Significant Solution

In response to these challenges, a new vision of the Web has emerged, known as Web 3.0 or the “Read-Write-Own Web,” which introduces a reality where users are active participants and owners of their data, promising to reduce the control of large intermediaries by returning power to users through the use of blockchain technology: a distributed and immutable digital ledger that records transactions securely and transparently across a decentralized network.

In this article, we will explore the potential of blockchain in enhancing digital democracy, providing new tools and opportunities for political participation through its principles of transparency, immutability, and censorship resistance.

Benefits and Challenges

We are all aware of the problems with traditional voting, such as the possibility of ballot manipulation or that vote counting, still too cumbersome, requires excessive manpower and cannot always be considered reliable, not to mention the exorbitant cost of elections (an example can be the 2013 elections, where the total cost borne by the Ministry of the Interior was around 315 million euros).

The use of a distributed ledger-based e-voting system could solve many of these issues, starting with security. The current voting system ensures anonymity for voters, but the transparency in the counting process is opaque, requiring a high degree of trust in the electoral commission. People must therefore trust the results entrusted to the electoral commissions. The main advantages of a blockchain-based e-voting system include:

• Vote Transparency:
  It would allow votes to be tracked, thus ensuring total transparency while protecting privacy since transactions on the network would remain anonymous.
  It would be impossible for a user to vote more than once because the executed transactions ledger has a permanent record of the vote linked to the ID.
  Everything would be completely transparent and consultable at any time by anyone.

• Efficiency:
  It would make election results immediately available, making the voting process much faster and more efficient than the old traditional system. Human error would be eliminated from the vote counting process, and the election result would be obtained just moments after the polls close.

• Financial Transparency: It would transparently and immutably record political donations and campaign expenses, allowing citizens to monitor the influence of money on politics and identify potential conflicts of interest.

• Digital Identity:
  It would act as a secure registry for digital identities, allowing citizens to autonomously control their personal information and share it securely and selectively with authorities and organizations.

Blockchain is a technology that promises to make processes more democratic and transparent, but there are some specific challenges to address:

• Fair Vote Counting: Ideally, during an election, no one should know the partial results until the voting is finished to avoid influencing those who have yet to vote. Unfortunately, blockchain does not guarantee this fairness. This means there could be a risk that information on votes already cast might leak before the end of voting, potentially influencing undecided or remaining voters.

• Freedom from External Pressure (Coercion): This is an issue that affects all types of voting, whether electronic or traditional, and whether managed centrally or decentralized. Using blockchain, each voter receives a digital confirmation of their vote. This helps verify that the vote has been correctly recorded, thus ensuring that the system is transparent and verifiable. However, there is a risk that this confirmation could be used to sell one’s vote or to show third parties how/what one voted, making coercion possible. In theory, blockchain offers a certain level of anonymity through the use of advanced cryptographic techniques that separate the voter’s physical identity from their vote. But, if someone were forced, they could reveal their private key, thus allowing the control or manipulation of their vote.

Despite this, the decentralization of blockchain guarantees greater democracy than traditional systems, and in a voting context, it could be the key to resolving the numerous conflicts that occur with government interference, as sadly happens in some countries during elections…

There’s a But!

To fully realize the potential of blockchain, broad adoption by governments, institutions, and citizens is necessary as its vast potential is hindered by lack of awareness, technical complexity, and resistance to change. For this reason, many blockchain solution providers like Affidaty invest and constantly commit to educating on the use and understanding of this technology.

Past Use Cases and a Look at DAOs

• The Thai Democratic Party seems to have become the first political party in the world to use blockchain technology to elect its leaders in the primary elections held from November 1 to 9, 2018, with over 120,000 voters. Voters were able to vote through a distributed ledger-based mobile app that asked voters to submit their ID. The identification documents used to verify party members and ballots were encrypted and stored on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized and distributed file system for storing large volumes of data using its own peer-to-peer protocol where nodes store a collection of file hashes in a network.
  
  
• In November, blockchain technology was also used in West Virginia to manage the federal general elections for military personnel and other American citizens living abroad. The state used the mobile app developed by startup Voatz to verify voter identities using facial recognition technology, comparing it with IDs and photographs that can be uploaded during the voter registration process.

These are just some of the recent solutions for Decentralized Governance (DAO) in the realm of digital democracy, using smart contracts to automate management and decision-making within a decentralized organization without intermediaries. This decision-making model can be applied to local, national, or community governance, allowing citizens to participate transparently in political decision-making and resource distribution. There are indeed numerous decentralized applications (dApps) demonstrating blockchain’s potential in decision-making, one of many DAOs is the Democracy Earth platform, which uses distributed ledger technology to enable online voting on public issues.

Conclusion

We have seen how blockchain could be a good approach to ensuring secure electronic voting and how good results have been reported through its use, but also how the same problems encountered in the best centralized electronic voting systems are observed. The biggest issue, as already mentioned, lies in the fact that being a transparent and public technology, a user could disclose their private address, and being a system not free from coercion, it would also be vulnerable to vote-buying and extortion.

A partial solution could be to allow voting multiple times. This would not eliminate the underlying problem but would make vote-buying much more complicated.
The idea would be to consider only the last vote in chronological order, allowing a user to change their vote until the last moment, making coercion more cumbersome and insecure.

Despite the uncertainties, the intersection between Web 3.0 and democracy remains a very promising field of experimentation and innovation, with the potential to profoundly reshape civic engagement and political participation in the 21st century, ensuring the integrity of the electoral process and citizens’ trust in the democratic system at a time when trust in institutions is significantly declining.

Valerio Filippi