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With the arrival of election season in the United States, concern for a safe and secure vote is on the rise, especially in the midst of a pandemic in which many people are unable to vote in person. Voting by mail is considered the next best option; however, President Donald Trump has carried out repeated verbal attacks against the mail-order voting system, said“Voting by correspondence is very dangerous for this country because of the cheaters. They go and get them. In many cases they are fraudulent. They have to vote. By the way, they should have voting cards.”
Many government officials, including FBI Director Christopher Wray, have contradicted the president’s words, stating, “We have historically not seen any kind of coordinated national election fraud in a major election, whether by mail or otherwise.”
In an effort to introduce a more reliable voting system, the USPS has filed a patent for the mail-in-voting blockchain. Second Investopedia, “In its most basic form, the blockchain is a digital ledger,” recording essentially all transactions. With encryption and decentralization of information, “the blockchain transaction database is incorruptible and every record is easily verifiable.” The most important feature of blockchain technology is that “the network cannot be dismantled or affected by a single party because it does not exist in one place”.
The USPS has created a voting system by post as a result of the high level of security the blockchain has to offer. The patent states that the process begins when “a registered voter receives a computer-readable code in the mail and confirms identity and confirms correct voting information in an election. The system separates voter identification and votes to ensure the anonymity of the vote and stores the votes on a ledger distributed on a blockchain. “
Also the technical head of the blockchain network Hedera Hashgraph, Paul Madsen explained that voting on the blockchain could allay double-voting concerns because “the votes of individual voters would be recorded, either on the blockchain or actually with timestamps and then recorded elsewhere”.
While it seems unlikely that blockchain voting will be ready in time for the 2020 election, as many ballots have already been mailed, the method looks very promising for the future of the elections to come.
