Blockchain voting system to be tested in Greenland

Long associated with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, blockchain technology could now support major elections in the autonomous Danish territory if a research project involving Concordium gets the thumbs up.

Apparently undeterred by the amount of negative publicity the end-to-end encryption system has received this year — with perhaps the most high-profile case being the Ronin hack when the vulnerable crypto platform was robbed of more than $600 million in funds — a consortium of researchers is seriously considering entrust the technology with the Nordic territory’s electoral sovereignty.

Greenland – a large country that is considered a self-governing state within the Kingdom of Denmark and has a population of around 56,000 – decided in 2020 that online elections would be the best solution in a region where voters often have to travel long distances to cast their ballots. .

Now a consortium of researchers, including blockchain provider Concordium, Aarhus University and the Danish not-for-profit organization Alexandra Institute, will use a government grant of DKK 3.6 million ($445,000) to look into blockchain – which supposedly offers a secure communication system between sender and receiver – can take digital voting to the next level.

Online ballot – the way of the future?

– There are of course many advantages to an online election – but mistrust and a lack of regulation-ready and secure solutions have prevented the vast majority of countries from moving forward, says Kåre Kjelstrøm, CTO at Concordium.

“In Greenland, where enormous distances make it difficult for people to cast their vote, an online solution can potentially increase voter participation, and this is one of the reasons why a change in the law in 2020 paved the way for Greenlanders to cast their vote online in the future.”

Kjelstrøm is confident that his company can offer a “scientifically based, decentralized” solution to

“the potential problems of building online choices on our chain.”

Carsten Schürmann, a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen who is overseeing the project, shared Kjelstrøm’s optimism – despite having previously criticized machine voting systems for their irregularities at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in 2018. He believes a blockchain-based solution could is being developed to make online elections more, not less, secure.

“Blockchains provide some relatively new opportunities to create security and increase transparency, which can be very interesting when we talk about Internet elections,” he said. “With this project, we will concretely examine how blockchain technologies can be used to mitigate attacks on the electoral process, detect technical and human errors and preserve the secrecy of the vote.”

He added: “Technologically we are moving into uncharted territory and depending on our results you can easily imagine that the many countries that could see the benefits of a [online] the election will also be able to use our results. Greenland – with its limited population and great distances – is an optimal place to start from.”

Blockchain bulletin

Bas Spitters, associate professor in the computer science department at Aarhus University and a blockchain researcher, said that cryptocurrency technology shares similarities with that required for digital elections.

“Electronic election protocols use a kind of bulletin board, and blockchains can be used as a private and secure bulletin board,” he said. “They are already used in minor elections to ensure that voters can check that their votes are correctly registered. In this project, we will explore whether it can also be used in larger elections. In particular, we aim to verify that the protocols used to verify the votes are inaccessible to outsiders and that they are secure.”

Spitters added that his team would also investigate whether Danish ID cards could be integrated into a blockchain system, allowing voters to identify themselves correctly while ensuring the protection of personal data.

More from Cybernews:

SpaceX spends millions on cyber warfare, says Musk

The original iPhone is now a collector’s item, fetching $39,000

Keyless car hackers arrested for aggravated car theft

Netflix announces “Profile Transfer” and hopes freeloaders will pay their share

Dutch police trick DeadBolt ransom gang

Subscribe to our newsletter