How Blockchain Could Secure Elections

Elections are under threat from malicious actors that can infiltrate voting machines, alter voter registration databases, coordinate disinformation campaigns, and more. Blockchain technology could help.

In early 2017, US Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson designated elections as part of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

This means elections are eligible to receive prioritized cybersecurity assistance and other federal protections from the Department of Homeland Security, alongside nuclear reactors, federal transportation systems, and more.

Election security is especially important as midterm elections approach.

It’s “too late to protect the 2018 elections.” — Alex Stamos, former Chief Security Officer at Facebook

US intelligence officials warn that Russia and other hostile governments could interfere in the US congressional midterms on November 6th.

This summer, Facebook announced it was investigating malicious activity on its social platform, similar to the election meddling seen during the 2016 presidential election.

While November 6th is likely too soon to effectively secure every aspect of midterms election, there is still time to more effectively protect systems ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Election security involves the protection of election processes and critical voting infrastructure from cyber attacks. Elements in need of protection include: registration databases, voting machines, other systems to manage the election, and systems that report & display results.

Some election security methods rely on time-consuming manual processes. This year, France and the Netherlands counted election ballots by hand to prevent hackers from interfering with results.

But now, blockchain is being touted as a new way to make elections more secure. Some states are already adopting the technology: West Virginia will make mobile blockchain voting available to overseas voters for the November midterm election.

Below, we detail the vulnerabilities in today’s elections, and the viability of blockchain technology to secure the future of voting.

Election security vulnerabilities
- Fake news & information warfare
- Hacked voter registration databases
- Hacked voting hardware
- Compromised election reporting systems
- Post-election audit
Could blockchain be the solution?
- Cryptographic media verification
- Mobile apps for blockchain voting
- Digital identity and blockchain voting
- Post-election audits on the blockchain
What’s next?

Election security vulnerabilities

Identifying vulnerabilities in election hardware and processes is vital to preventing future attacks.

For election cybersecurity, the focus is often on hacking voting machines. However, vulnerable machines are only one part of a complex, interconnected system with multiple weak points for bad actors to exploit.

Securing elections requires securing the entire process.

The five most vulnerable parts of the electoral process, outlined by Ben Buchanan and Michael Sulmeyer of Harvard’s Belfer Center Cybersecurity Project, are:

Information warfare
Electronic voter registration databases
Voting machinery and tabulation systems
Election reporting systems
Post-election audits

Below, we detail a voter’s journey through the election process and highlight security vulnerabilities (in orange) along the way.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of these potential election vulnerabilities.

PRE-ELECTION

Fake news & information warfare

Before an election, the media voters consume helps shape their political opinions. But due to targeted disinformation campaigns, voters can have trouble determining fact-based sources to accurately inform their vote.

Digital deceptions distributed in the pre-election stages have a profound effect on election outcomes. Computational propaganda, digitally doctored photos and videos, weaponized social media, and more all can derail the democratic process.

In the run up to US midterm elections, experts are saying that homegrown disinformation operations in the US are starting to look like the foreign influence playbook deployed by Russia leading up to the 2016 election. Facebook has reportedly identified 559 pages and 251 accounts run by Americans designed to amplify misleading content and manufacture false consensus online.

Meanwhile, foreign influence operations are not going away. In August, Facebook announced it had identified and eliminated a new Russian network aimed at influencing Americans before the midterms.

For more on the effects of disinformation and digital deceptions, check out the CB Insights deep dive on the future of information warfare.

Hacked voter registration databases

Attacks on voter registration databases can also threaten people’s ability to vote.

Removing sections of voters likely to support one candidate could effectively swing a close election.

If a person’s identity has been removed from the voter registration database, they can’t check in at polls. An attack that deletes an entire state’s registration database could delay or even stop an election from taking place altogether.

According to indictments released by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Russian intelligence officers successfully breached voter registration databases during the 2016 US presidential election. The indictments do not say whether Russia’s meddling had an effect on the election’s outcome.

The indictments echo a US Senate Intelligence Committee finding, which stated that Russia was in a position to, at a minimum, alter or delete voter registration data for a small number of states.

A cyber attack on voter registration databases is also in part an attack on privacy.

These databases often contain personally identifiable information (PII) such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and more. Hackers can exploit PII by selling it online in illicit dark web markets and use it to target potential voters with disinformation and propaganda.

DURING AN ELECTION

Hacked voting hardware

Votes and election results can be tampered with by hackers that exploit vulnerabilities in voting machinery and tabulation systems.

From a cybersecurity perspective, every part of the election process that involves some type of electronic device or software (especially if connected to the internet) is vulnerable to hacking.

However, security experts agree that internet-connected voting machines, tabulation systems, and their networks are particularly vulnerable.

This year, for the first time, DEF CON (one of the world’s largest hacker conferences) featured a voting machine village (Voting Village) that let hackers hunt and exploit cyber vulnerabilities in election infrastructure — including voting machines, voter registration databases, and election office networks.

According to event organizers:

“By the end of the conference, every piece of equipment in the Voting Village was effectively breached in some manner. Participants with little prior knowledge and only limited tools and resources were quite capable of undermining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of these systems.”

One of the biggest worries when it comes to hacked voting machines is that these devices are subject to class breaks — security vulnerabilities that break not just one system, but an entire class of systems.

For example, stealing data through a software vulnerability at one company is a breach, but finding a common software vulnerability that exposes hundreds or thousands of companies at once is a class break.

Vulnerable supply chains create openings for large-scale election security class breaks.

Hackers at DEF CON reported multiple cases of voting machines with parts manufactured outside of the US (including hardware developed in China), highlighting the possibility of foreign entities exploiting vulnerable election supply chains.

A vulnerability in the election infrastructure supply chain means that hackers only have to find one point of entry to disrupt an entire make or model of voting machine.

A small number of election technology vendors and support contractors service the software systems used by many local governments.

Three companies dominate the American election industry: Dominion, Hart InterCivic, and, the largest, Election Systems and Software (ES&S). Ninety-two percent of US voters that voted in the last ten years did so on a machine made by one of these three companies.

Attackers targeting one or some of these companies could spread malware on election equipment across thousands of jurisdictions at once, affecting millions of voters.

POST-ELECTION

Compromised election reporting systems

Manipulated reporting systems could announce inaccurate voting results.

Researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center predict that if automated data streams are used to inform news organizations of an election’s outcome, attackers could manipulate those data streams to try to trick the news into announcing the wrong winner.

Hackers could also take over an official social media account and disseminate false results directly.

We could also soon see the creation of spoofed videos of officials announcing bogus election winners. Highly realistic fake videos could be created using generative adversarial networks (GAN) — a type of AI used to carry out unsupervised machine learning. In a GAN, opposed neural networks work together to fabricate increasingly realistic audio, image, and video content.

Post-election audit

Dismay over an election can prompt calls for a post-election audit — comparing digital results to paper ballots.

However, post-election audits are vulnerable to inaccuracy without proper voting machinery in place.

Experts agree that reliable post-election audits are only possible with a paper trail. This means that voting machines that only record votes electronically (often via touchscreen) are not suitable for ensuring election integrity.

The safest voting machines use optical scan paper ballot systems. In these systems, voters mark their votes by filling in an oval on a paper ballot. Then the paper ballot is scanned by a machine at the polling place and digitized for electronic tabulation.

Today, there is no national mandate requiring paper ballot systems in the United States. States such as Georgia, New Jersey, Nevada, and others do not have a paper trail to follow post-election.

A new bill called the Protecting American Votes and Elections Act proposes that all state and local elections must ensure voter-verified paper ballots can be audited.

The bill also wants all federal elections to be subject to post-election audits.

The most reliable and cost-effective post-election audits are known as risk-limiting audits. Essentially, these test only the number of ballots needed to mathematically determine the accuracy of election outcomes.

Risk-limiting audits rely on hand-calculating the margin of victory to proportionally determine the number of ballots that need to be audited. Risk-limiting audits are new and adoption is not standard across election jurisdictions.

Currently, only 28 states require audits following elections.

Could blockchain technology be the solution?

Blockchain’s fundamental characteristics — transparency, immutability, and accountability — underscore the technology’s potential for securing elections.

While blockchain’s proponents argue that the technology could increase voter participation and improve security, some cybersecurity and election experts say blockchain makes election processes overly complicated and no more secure than other internet-connected election systems.

Despite this lack of consensus, several pilot projects around the world are starting to lay the foundations for blockchain-based voting.

Below, we highlight the technology behind a theoretically secure blockchain-based election.

To understand more about blockchain technology, check out the CB Insights primer: What Is Blockchain Technology?

Here’s how blockchain technology could affect the voting process.