An American voter submits his or her ballot. (Photo by Ed JONES / AFP) (Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images)
Screven County, Georgia made history on November 5, 2024 by becoming the first county in the United States to use the Bitcoin blockchain to save its election results.
The Screven County Board of Elections worked with Simple Proof, a US company that protects digital records using the Bitcoin blockchain, to ensure their election results could not be changed.
Screven County Elections Supervisor Stacy Scott Mincey hired Simple Proof to ensure her county’s vote processing wasn’t called into question like it was in another Georgia county during the election. 2020.
“One of my goals has been to do everything I can to make sure county residents feel safe and that their votes count, especially with increased concerns about security and voter fraud,” m Mincey explained in an interview. “Using Simple Proof was just another step we took to ensure our results could not be falsified in any way.”
What the simple proof does
Simple Proof gained notoriety when its immutable proof service was used to back up the results of the last presidential election in Guatemala, which were detailed in the documentary Immutable Democracy.
Simple Proof uses an open source protocol called OpenTimestamps, developed by Peter Todd, a former Bitcoin Core developer.
The protocol enables cryptographic timestamping, which uses hash functions to preserve information on Bitcoin’s immutable ledger. The information is stored in the OP_RETURN function of a Bitcoin transaction. This is where the party sending a transaction can include arbitrary information, similar to the “memo” space on a physical check.
Anyone can then verify this immutable proof on the Simple Proof platform or independently and trustlessly via the Bitcoin blockchain. In simpler terms, Simple Proof allows the public to verify election results and other official documents once they are secured by the Bitcoin blockchain.
Simple proof and Screven County
In the case of the Screven County elections, the information stored on the blockchain was the Election Summary Reports, which contain vote counts, and the Statement of Votes Cast, which provides an overview of election results and other county-wide details.
Carlos Toriello, elections manager at Simple Proof, said his organization is working to make it as easy as possible for Mincey to protect these documents.
“We wanted to make sure it was painless for Stacy,” Toriello told me in an interview.
He then explained that all Mincey had to do was email the documents to Simple Proof’s immutable proof service, which automatically timestamped the documents on the blockchain.
The first instance of this timestamp occurred at 7:54 PM EST on November 5, 2024 and can be viewed via its Simple Proof verification page.
Screenshot of Simple Proof Document Verification Portal
“Block number 869,047 is the first block on the Bitcoin chain to contain evidence of a US election,” Toriello said.
Screven County Voting System
Although plain proof protects voting records, it does not guarantee the legitimacy of votes. In the United States, this responsibility falls to the local election board.
“In Georgia, the secretary of state is doing a great job ensuring elections are secure,” Mincey said.
“We use machines, but we also have paper ballots. So if there is a problem, we can go back and manually count the paper ballots,” she added.
Mincey went on to explain that the machines counted the ballots and produced the aforementioned reports. However, she and her team have a way to verify that the reports are at least mostly correct.
“Our county does an audit where we manually count a portion of the ballots to make sure they match what we got from the machine,” Mincey said. “I think this is an additional security measure that we need to take to ensure the validity of the elections.”
How Mincey found a simple proof
Not only does Mincey have extensive knowledge of how voting works in her state, but she is also very knowledgeable about Bitcoin. And it was thanks to Bitcoin that she met Toriello.
Members of Mincey’s Meetup group attended Bitcoin 2024 last July (Mincey was unable to attend the event). Group members met Toriello and Simple Proof’s booth at the conference. Toriello and the Simple Proof team were on hand to raise awareness about how public records can be immutably protected using Bitcoin.
“Our call to action was that Uncle Honey Badger wanted you to protect the election with Bitcoin,” Toriello said with a laugh.
(The Honey Badger, known for his tenacity and resilience, is sometimes considered Bitcoin’s mascot.)
Promotional image for Simple Proof’s “Protect the Elections” campaign.
One of the group members spoke with Toriello at the event and stayed in touch with him afterward. In September, Mincey’s Meetup group invited Toriello to speak virtually at one of their meetings.
“He spoke at the meeting, and then I started talking to him because I was very intrigued by how we could ensure that our results were verified,” Mincey said. “I was blown away by how they used Simple Proof in Guatemala.”
In late October, Mincey proposed using Simple Proof at a board meeting, and the board voted in favor. Mincey contacted Toriello and the rest is history.
Subsequent implementation of a simple proof
Toriello is optimistic after the success of Simple Proof and Screven County and would now like to see Georgia implement Simple Proof’s services statewide for its upcoming elections.
“We proved we could implement this in about a week in one county,” Toriello said. “Why not do this in every county in the state of Georgia from now on?” »
Mincey would also like to see all Georgia counties use Simple Proof. She actually wanted that to be the case in the last election, but time was not on her side.
“I was hoping to be able to present it to our officials at the state level so it could be used more widely,” she said. “But this time we didn’t have time to really disseminate it statewide.”
Toriello is also aiming beyond Georgia.
“We’ve already made inroads in a lot of different locations across the country,” said Toriello, who believes more counties and states will see the value of what Simple Proof offers after this success in County. Screven.
“I want this to spread like wildfire, because the authorities see that it is simple to implement and they can afford it,” he added.
“We are very optimistic.”
