Greenland is looking at blockchain technology for elections

Greenland has developed the Concordium blockchain together with two top universities to investigate the possibility of using a blockchain-based election system.

The island nation, part of the Kingdom of Denmark, is spending NOK 3.6 million (£420,000) to research the use of the technology that underpins cryptocurrency to create an online voting system for its 56,500 residents.

The funds will be shared between the project partners Concordium, COBRA, Aarhus University, Alexandra Institute and the IT university. Due to a change in the law in 2020, many Greenlanders will likely have to cast their vote online in upcoming national elections.

A group of researchers from Concordium Blockchain, Aarhus University, the Alexandra Institute and the IT University will investigate whether a blockchain-based system will be a more reliable e-choice on the world’s largest island.

DIREC, a collaboration between the computer science departments of eight Danish universities and the Alexandra Institute, granted the group DKK 3.6 million for the ambitious project for privacy protection and software-independent voting protocol. The Department for Social Affairs, Labor Market and Internal Affairs in Greenland will work closely with the group on this.

“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,” said Concordium CTO Kåre Kjelstrøm.

“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 law change in 2020 paved the way for the Greenlandic government to give Greenlanders the opportunity to cast their voice online in the future.”

The aim, explained the IT university’s chief investigator Carsten Schürmann, is to give Greenland’s decision-makers good conditions for deciding which system they will use to hold online elections.

– From a research point of view, the project can also be valuable. Technologically, we are moving into uncharted territory, and depending on our results, you can easily imagine that the many, many countries that can see the benefits of an election will also be able to use our results, he said.

“And finally, Greenland – with its limited population and great distances – is an optimal place to start from.”

Is blockchain the solution?

Bas Spitters, associate professor at Aarhus University and researcher at Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus, who is internationally recognized for his research related to the verification of blockchain technologies, sees great potential in the project.

“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.

“In addition, we need to work with Concordium to investigate whether, by integrating MitID into their blockchain, it will be possible to give voters the opportunity to identify themselves while protecting their private information.”

Carsten Schürmann, who many consider one of the world’s leading experts on election technology, has previously been critical of the internet. However, he is convinced that online voting will become widespread in the coming years, and recognizes the importance of creating a reliable system for it, for which this project can create the best possible conditions.

“Blockchains provide some relatively new opportunities to create security and increase transparency, which can be very interesting when we talk about internet elections,” he added.

“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. We will do this by developing some protocols for a system that can be verified and is what we call software independent.”