Bitcoin Blockchain Inspires Kenyan Electoral Board to Implement Transparent Voting System
Kenyans held national elections on Tuesday, September 9, 2022, and the voting system closely mirrored Bitcoin.
Supporters of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta celebrate after Kenyatta was declared the winner … [+]
The comparison between the Bitcoin blockchain and the Kenyan voting system used in September 2022 is impressive. Initially, all polling stations were divided into 46,229 units, and votes cast in a polling station were counted, signed and accepted as a permanent record. This compares to the Bitcoin network, which has an estimated 14,951 decentralized nodes spread across the globe, according to Bitcoin analytics firm Bitnodes.
The system combines both manual and electronic gear systems to ensure safety. Kenya’s Integrated Electoral Management System (KIE
A man puts his thumb on a biometric machine to check his ID to cast his vote at a polling station in … [+]
The IEBC will then act as a third party, collecting and analyzing data from these polling stations. This includes collecting all signed voting forms manually, verifying them with the eligible voter and the electronic copy, and collecting them within seven days of the election to announce the official winners. At the time of writing, the IEBC had received and verified 46,193 of the 46,229 presidential election forms and was awaiting the 36 remaining forms so that the election results could be announced.
This compares to the ease with which blockchain analytics firms such as Chainalysis are able to search for data from the Bitcoin blockchain and publish insights.
The consensus mechanism is different from Bitcoins. Political party representatives would watch the entire ballot process in a polling station immediately after the voting window closed, count each vote and sign the record in the election system. This copy, once signed, will be a permanent record. The IEBC representatives would then send an electronic copy of the signed form to the IEBC headquarters, followed by the physical form to the same location. To ensure transparency, party representatives would also send a copy to their party headquarters.
If this copied Bitcoin, a signed copy of the scheme would be sent to other nodes to update all copies.
Each polling station has a maximum of 700 registered voters. The number of voters in the polling station will either be the number of people who voted or the number of people who voted before the voting window closed. This means that each record contains 700 entries. By comparison, Bitcoin’s block size is one megabyte per block.
To vote successfully, a voter had to bring an original copy of their national ID card, go to the registered polling station and log in with an IEBC biometric scanner. To sign a transaction in Bitcoin, one must have a public address (similar to an ID card) and a private key (compared to fingerprints on the biometric scanner).
When IEBC headquarters receives and verifies a form from a polling station, the form is published on the website as an official copy. Voters, party representatives, media and aspirants can download and compare this data with their own copy from the polling station. They can also count votes to determine election winners before the IEBC announces the official results.
This compares to the public nature of the Bitcoin ledger, where anyone can query any Bitcoin transaction and see the address.
When a voter logs into a polling station using biometrics, the device sends an electronic signature to the IEBC servers, notifying them that the citizen has voted. While this solves the double-voting problem, Bitcoin’s blockchain solves the double-spending problem.
Votes are stored in the IEBC database in the voting system and the user only needs to sign them. This means that all registered voters’ information is recorded, and they only visit the polling station on election day to sign that so-and-so is their preferred candidate. Bitcoins are stored on the ledger of the Bitcoin network, and you only use your private keys to sign for your bitcoins to be moved to a specific public address.
To win the Kenyan presidential election, one must get 50% of the votes cast plus one. This means that if someone wanted to steal the election, they would have to manipulate data from 50% of the polling stations plus one. This will require a significant investment in terms of resources, but it will ensure the security of the voting system.
If one or more people wanted to hack the Bitcoin network, they would have to control 50% of the nodes plus one. This will necessitate a massive pooling of resources, establishing Bitcoin as the world’s most secure monetary network.
If a region went offline or the voting process was disrupted, other regions would still vote seamlessly and the missing data would be added when the bottleneck was handled. In Bitcoin, if any miners or users are offline, their coins are still on-chain and their transactions are added to the blockchain when they come online.
The IEBC designed the system to minimize trust and allow voters to verify all records, while Bitcoin’s infrastructure is designed to eliminate trust and allow users to verify. In Bitcoin, collective nodes are the single point of failure, just as collective polling stations are the single point of failure in the IEBC voting system.
On the Bitcoin network, once a transaction is signed, it is final, verifiable and cannot be changed or reversed. Likewise, once the votes cast are registered and signed, they are final, verifiable (you can go and count the contents of the ballot box), and cannot be changed.
The difference between the two is that top IEBC officials can change voter registration details and transfer voters. There is no single administrator in Bitcoin who can move Bitcoin or change transactions.
Furthermore, the biometric devices for polling stations have the entire register but can only admit voters who are registered for that specific location. In Bitcoin, one’s transaction can be signed by any node on the network. This is probably an IEBC feature designed to ensure that one does not vote in a place they do not live.
The voting records are not recorded in the voter’s book. The KIEMS unit stores the election book and scans signed ballot papers while the votes remain in their respective ballot boxes. The Bitcoin ledger, on the other hand, stores both the addresses and the Bitcoins.
Although it is debatable whether the system designer was directly inspired by the Bitcoin network, the similar features are convincing to conclude that they were inspired by the Bitcoin blockchain. If you wanted a foolproof system without a single point of failure, where else would you look?
Disclosure: I own bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
