Only 56% of the US voting age population cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election. Collecting data from presidential and mid term elections between 2002 and 2016, the youngest voters, between 18 and 29, turn out in the lowest rates, just 47% for presidential elections and reaching as low as 17% in mid terms. This is not entirely political apathy. A quick look at any social media platform will reveal partisans on both sides of the aisle, vigorously debating pretty much every policy issue we face. It’s not apathy, it’s the friction involved in the process, a friction I have come to know first hand.
Nine million votes are cast from overseas, about 6.5% of all votes tallied in the 2016 election. While in California earlier this year, I registered with the Secretary of State for an absentee ballot to be delivered by email. Now here I sit, a week before the election and I have still not received my absentee ballot. I could attempt to use the Federal Write-In Absentee ballot, but the last email I received from the state mentioned that I needed to mail in my ballot four weeks prior to election day.
Voting process friction is not the only issue. Voter suppression is a far greater concern. This can often be done through voter purges or poll closures which create voting conditions in favour of the political party making those decisions. A transparent digital system of voting would not only help reduce friction for expatriates, voter suppression would become dramatically more difficult, with attempted purges leaving clear trails and poll closures no longer a concern.
Many of us are expecting a blue wave to sweep through the U.S. on November 6th, but those frictions, accidental or intentional, may depress turnout and skew results. Even with a successful blue wave, having such a gap between possible and actual voters means that our government is not acting in accordance with a true democratic majority. Our democracies are long overdue for a technological upgrade to their voting process, one that is built built for a modern, globally connected and mobile world.
So how will I be able vote from my apartment in Paris when my passport still reads U.S.A.? The blockchain technology behind Bitcoin may play a very important part.
One of the biggest issues around digital voting is the concept of vote scarcity. One person should not be able to vote multiple times. This becomes a much bigger risk than a single individual accidentally voting twice. Nation state influencers like Russia may seek to manipulate our election outcomes. They need only impersonate a few hundred voters here and there to swing tight races. The 2016 presidential election famously swung on a total of 80,000 votes in three key states.
Ensuring digital scarcity has actually been a problem for many years. The music and movie industries had issues with this, as it was basically impossible to stop someone from creating a copy of a file and sharing it online with a few hundred thousand of their closest friends.
This is where Bitcoin comes in, as the very first digital asset that has true scarcity. It is essentially impossible to counterfeit Bitcoin. The innovation that enables this feature is a transparent, distributed ledger called the blockchain, and a consensus mechanism that requires a real world scarce asset, electricity, to be spent to validate legitimate transactions. What does that mean for voting? It means the same technology and principles of Bitcoin, which is a scarce asset that most closely represents money or gold, can be applied. Digital voting can be done on a transparent ledger, in real-time, over the internet, from anywhere in the world, with voting scarcity that is un-hackable, with the right blockchain. That’s correct, no more risk of foreign hackers secretly adjusting things to suit their government.
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