Article originally published for Cryptowriter at Voice. https://www.voice.com/post/@epicdylan/its-not-decentralized-a-review-of-the-usps-blockchain-voting-patent-1605305690-1
Earlier this year, the United States Postal Service made headlines: a patent filed on February 7, 2020 was published August 13, and everyone got very excited. New technology with the promise to bring accessible online voting to every registered American voter’s smartphone could make counting votes faster and more accurate than ever before. It could boost turnout, which many in politics hope will improve the quality of political conversations about the issues. And it could eliminate fraud entirely, which would allay concerns many current voters suffer from. Blockchain benefits from these associations, generally by increased investor confidence, a trend observable in token price increases.
But does it actually live up to all of these promises? I’ve ghostwritten one patent and read dozens of them over the years, but I’m no lawyer and no intellectual property specialist. The main gist of what I’ve picked up from my involvement in various technology projects is that the claims and the priority are the most important parts of a patent. The priority is what gives the patent the power to grant its owner exclusivity with respect to the work thus protected, and the claims detail the protected parts of the work.
In the USPS patent filed this year, what is detailed is an online voting system which just sounds amazing up front. Having traveled to my polling place last month during early voting, I was nervous about contracting the coronavirus. This alone constitutes adequate incentive to take the process online for me, but the experience ever since the election has been dreadful as well. Who wants to sit around for months as the results are slowly tallied and finally certified? It’s 2020. Why aren’t we using technology to solve some of these problems?
Let’s dig in and see what this patent actually does.
Decentralized Blockchains: Public vs. Private
A decentralized public blockchain is a remarkable thing. It constitutes a computer program which is run by a group of computers that are designed to be fungible. This means that if any one of the computers needs to stop running the program, it can safely be dropped and replaced by another one. The immutability one hears about with respect to blockchain, and the various different attacks we can read about, are important considerations to take into account but perhaps not as important as they seem at first glance.
At the end of the day, as any blockchain skeptic will remind you, all of this could be done by a different sort of LEDGER or database. In fact, it can be highly inefficient with respect to network resources if we use blockchains to solve problems that don’t need blockchains to be involved. A bunch of different privately controlled voting databases is what we currently have, and though I doubt his altruism, this system has been called into question by the American President Donald Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections now.
Our current database is a mess. It is both centralized and opaque; which means we can’t go check our ballots to make sure they still reflect our actual vote — we only get access to the final numbers after the count takes place. In contentious modern-day politics, this is problematic; although it is not clear that giving voters more access would directly alleviate claims of fraud, it is at least possible that the ability to return to a given vote and review it might help to allay individual anxieties in this space.
Central databases also are subject to ownership, and though it is extremely difficult to get access to hack into them and change the values you might find there, it is at least theoretically possible to do so. With a public and decentralized blockchain, the argument is that even if you did attempt to modify the table values, the network would automatically detect and correct the resulting errors when your table was reconciled. Under a system like the Cosmos DBFT validator model, you would incur a financial penalty for trying.
A private blockchain is a useful way to store data because it is lightweight and virtually infinitely interoperable with existing technologies — you can put anything you like into it, then get your data back out onto almost any system you could want it on. It helps companies keep their data from becoming locked into legacy systems that are difficult and risky to update as times change and better technologies are developed.
Private blockchains are thus quite useful for ensuring that the data itself is kept up, but these are still controlled by one party and thus subject to the same security risks that ordinary databases are. At least, unless one achieves decentralization, perhaps by distributing the ledger to various departments within a corporation. However, one issue that arises from this point is that sometimes inventory goes missing and a process for reconciliation needs to be available or else the accuracy of the database will just never be very good. The system which works for keeping track of inventory will not be the same as the one that works best for voting.
What If A Centralized Private Blockchain Powers The Secure Voting App?
I hate to break it to you, but the USPS patent does not specify either a public or a decentralized form of the distributed ledger for its hypothetical blockchain voting app. The good news is that it’s merely unclear in this regard — I believe it may be possible to build this application on top of something like Ethereum, or EOS, for example, and thereby accomplish both of these goals, despite this lack of specifics in the patent. It seems unlikely that the US Government would be willing to use third-party technology, however.
Since these aspects of the voting blockchain are not directly discussed in the literature, we must also consider the possibility that a centralized private chain could be built specifically for this exclusive purpose. Who would control it? Most likely the top elections official in each state, but possibly the officials in each congressional district. It could perhaps be decentralized if the system were to set up validator status for each of them, allowing a pseudo-decentralization that could still be controlled by the US Government, but the issue here is a structural one which is of the utmost importance if we really want to implement this technology.
I won’t beat around the bush. If secure automation and accessible voting is the intention of the patent, kudos to the developers for putting the work in and actually designing a technology which can allow American Citizens their right to vote in an easier and simpler way. That said, I believe most of the benefits inherent in the blockchain movement may be left on the table if a coherent effort toward decentralization is not made.
Let’s boil it down to this question:
What’s the difference between the solution presented in this patent and, say, a Google Sheets file in which each voter was granted a unique access code to modify only one cell?
There are a few; one of which being that this method of accomplishing that task is presentable in a variety of different ways, including, as the patent makes clear, traditional methods of voting.
To quote from the text of the patent, “The security of a voting system can be increased by using the dependability and security of the United States Postal Service or similar entity, and this can be incorporated with a secure computer system using a blockchain or distributed ledger to ensure vote security and to prevent tampering or modification of electronic voting results.” The case being made here is not only one of accessibility, but one of security as well. If each State were granted Validator status and duty, or if each County or Congressional District were, or if each Post Office were to receive a powerful computer to help ensure the security and uptime of the network, it might be possible that the US Government could create a public blockchain for recording election results, but this patent seems to provide little in the way of insight into how that political debate will play out. We need to be very careful to eliminate any angle by which a future authoritarian could potentially subvert the system by cutting funding or ordering computers to be destroyed.
The patent, as we see here, does provide us with the mechanical means to produce this voting system and is particularly insightful with respect to ways to integrate this new technology into the existing voting system, but it does not go much further than that. As such, most of the benefits or problems that result from the implementation of this system will be dependent upon variables written into said implementation by the parties responsible.
What Did We Learn?
What did we learn by investigating this patent, if it’s literally just a technical description of how to build this thing? Well, I would argue that we learned quite a bit. The process of implementing this technology will involve legislating funds toward its development as well as an overhaul of the American civic process more generally. In the most ideal form of the possible implementation of blockchain technology to accommodate American politics, we would likely see a distributed ledger in which status as a network validator was tied to statehood or other acceptable American Government status and frequently audited by disinterested third parties for security issues.
In the least forward-thinking application of this technology, we would still end up with a lot of benefits over our present situation, however. Hypothetically, a secure online voting system which prioritized accessibility, immutability, and tamper-resistance would be lightyears ahead of the systems in contemporary American jurisdictions which still use paper ballots and/or electronic ballots which do not provide voters with the ability to go back and look at their votes.
It is likely that the issue here will take years to resolve. The concepts of decentralization and accessibility will probably become hotly contested by the political parties at some point, but I find a bit of solace in the fact that we’re looking at it as an option. I applaud the USPS for taking the initiative and thoroughly solving the problem of voting via decentralized ledger, and I anticipate the upcoming discussion about it with mixed feelings.
