Blockchain Voting Standards: GBA

Election Security Standards Bring Digital Audit Trails

The recent app meltdown in the Iowa caucus highlighted the difficulties in using paper ballots as an audit trail. When the app failed, the paper ballot audit trail was not up to the task of permitting an efficient, credible reconstruction of the vote tally in a timely manner. Paper ballots are difficult to decipher and slow to count by hand creating difficulties in delivering credible election results in the event of a recount. An electronic audit trail created in blockchain provides an alternative, a digital audit trail as simple as one used by any local retail farm store to tally the day’s receipts. The blockchain audit trail, when used in a recount, provides quick, accurate results.

Voting standards are dependent on making fraud detectable and having a strong local two-party system that is able to have poll watchers from each party at each poll site to prevent and report fraud if necessary. Voting systems need to protect the integrity of each vote selection. Voting security standards need to follow what has been learned from protecting financial transactions with once and only once electronic delivery. Enforcement of simple, understandable, widely available standards goes a long way to prevent corruption.

Key Points in this PowerPoint:

• App problems in Iowa illustrate difficulties inherent in electronic voting
• Standards need to address the protection of devices 24/7
• Voting equipment BIOS a severe vulnerability
• Need to make fraud detectable
• Middle of the night break-ins to stored voting equipment creates a major vulnerability