For the fifth legislative term following New York, the Member of the State Assembly, Clyde Vanel, introduced a bill that would order the State to study whether the use of distributed big book technology, better known as blockchain, could “protect” the files of voters and elections.
The identical bills presented in the sessions dating from 2017 have not found a traction. Although the legislation only requires the study of the potential use of technology, by making the first enrollment of experts in blockchain technology, electoral fraud, cybersecurity, voters’ files and election results, the reception of these technologies in 2025 remains lukewarm.
Mark Lindeman, director of policies and strategy, with a non-profit-verified vote, said that he did not know what problem linked to the elections that Blockchain, a technology made famous for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, could solve.
“For the vast majority of us, who do not live in the world of Bitcoin and do not really want it, it is really difficult for me to imagine a situation in which I could feel better about the results of the elections knowing that they are on a big book distributed somewhere,” said Lindeman.
Vanel, an intellectual property lawyer and democrat who was not immediately available for an interview in 2019, said that he thought that governments should not neglect cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology. He underlined a scandal of the 2016 New York Elections Council in which 117,000 voters from Brooklyn were poorly purged electoral reports, an incident which, according to him, could have been bypassed if the board of directors had used a large unchanging public book like that offered by blockchain.
Voters, especially Trump supporters, have become more suspicious of election results in recent years.
Last year, the Pew Research Center questioned the supporters of Donald Trump and the supporters of Kamala Harris to find significant differences in their beliefs on how the elections are carried out. Trump supporters were much less likely to believe that unqualified voting persons would be prevented from voting or declaring confident that after the elections, it would be clear which candidate had won.
Lindeman said the Republicans and Democrats have long been concerned about the integrity of elections, recalling controversy in 2004 when some supporters of John Kerry said that some votes had been recovered.
He noted that the best source of electoral results is the websites of the county or the state, but that these figures are only reports on what the number of bulletins show.
“The Truth soil lives first with the voted voting ballots voted, then with the documents that electoral officials produced during the certification of the results,” said Lindeman. “The entire process of attesting to a sacred set of electoral results seems to me to deactivate.”
The continuation of an immutable and anchored recording of each vote remains enticing for many, and at least a dozen nations around the world, from Brazil to Estonia, have experienced the use of blockchain for events as important as the national elections to vote internally on the changes of policy. A mobile voting application supported by the blockchain used in the United States to collect live voting ballots from overseas voters in certain states was finally found in 2020 to contain serious security vulnerabilities before discussions on the wider use of the application are stretched.
A research document in 2020 published in the Journal of Cybersecurity at the University of Oxford said that the voting based on the Internet and the blockchain “would considerably increase the risk of undetectable electoral failures”.
Josh Greenbaum, director of non-profit Foundation technology in the United States, wrote in an opinion article that blockchain technology is “extremely risky and vulnerable to a multitude of dangerous cybersecurity attacks”, but also a more constructive conversation of conversations on the way of improving security under the current paradigm.
The county of Screven, in Georgia, became the first county of the United States to use the blockchain of the Bitcoin platform to record the results of the elections. The County government used the technology of the Georgia Simple Proof startup, which also supported the elections in Guatemala and a convention of the Republican Party of the County of Williamson, in the county of Williamson.
“Our solution is very useful to anchor data on a specific moment using the Bitcoin blockchain, but people do not vote on the blockchain using simple evidence,” said the co -founder of the company Rafael Cordon.
Screven, county in the south-east of Georgia with around 14,000 residents, collected voting ballots normally last November, said Cordon, before the county electoral administrator uses a USB reader to move a digital report generated by voting machines on a computer that is not connected to the Internet.
“This computer tabulas the results, then the electoral supervisor clocks this final report using simple evidence,” he said. “And then they connect to the sleep report system of the Secretary of State’s elections and download the results. So what they have done is protect this information at this specific moment, so in the future or downstream in the data aggregation process, they can prove that their information has not been changed.”
Cordon said there was an appetite among certain governments of states and county, including in Wyoming, to add such layers of evidence to their electoral results. But he said that his business is now focusing on public archives and the federal government, especially after Trump has announced an interest in blockchain and a “digital active strategy” which includes the storage of bitcoin.
