Midterm Elections and the Blockchain
I never thought that voting, being a centuries-old legacy process, would be an essential application for the blockchain. After all, the USA is an advanced democracy, with plenty of computers to add up the votes of the individual US citizens. How hard could it be?
Enter the 2018 midterm elections, the Broward County and the Broward’s county election supervisor, Brenda Snipes. In the Broward County election this year just about everything went wrong, from the destruction of the legal ballots to the creation of possibly fraudulent ones on a massive scale. By law, the county officials have to submit the votes for counting within 30 min of the polls closing. In the Broward County in November 2018, 30 minutes became 4 days. During that time 83,000 new ballots have been “found,” and GOP senator lead shrank from 60,000+ votes at the time of the polls closing to just above 10,000 votes. One could infer that if the ballot finding process took just one day longer, Florida Senate seat would have been flipped for the Democratic candidate.
How could this happen in the world’s most advanced democracy? The answer is the corruption of course, but the election process is supposed to be protected from the political manipulation. Instead, we have seen the Broward County election officials filling in the empty ballots and trucks arriving and leaving the election center in the middle of the night without any supervision. We have seen observer oversight of the election blocked, even after the judge ruled that oversight officials must have access to the process documents by the end of the 3rd day. While the other Florida counties, even those suffering from the hurricane damage, submitted the ballots on time, there were counties in several other states in which the late count favored the Democratic party. Many commentators concluded that 2018 midterm elections were stolen.
When I entered the polling center in California where I live and was handing my ID to a lovely lady behind the desk, she just waved the hand and said no ID was necessary. In other words, I could have voted as many times as I wanted. I guess California in its effort to make sure that “every vote count” also believes that the more, the merrier and that you can not have too many votes, even if they are fraudulent.
How does this relate to the blockchain? SEC likes to emphasize that decentralized crypto cannot be trusted until it is “properly regulated” by a central, wise human regulator. If there is one thing that 2018 midterm elections proved is that human regulators cannot be trusted. From now on we just can not trust the humanly controlled election process. It can be too easily biased toward a specific candidate and towards one particular party. Sanctity of the election process is the very bedrock of democracy, and it has been tainted. How can the US voters go to a polling booth in 2020, knowing that their vote may be stolen by the unscrupulous election officers?
Something must change, or the very future of the US democracy is in peril. Fortunately, there is a simple solution. Blockchain can eliminate fraudulent votes, provided we will muster the political will to demand the free elections. Satoshi Nakamoto solved the “double spend” problem in his famous 2008 bitcoin paper a long time ago, what we need now is to avoid “double voting” and the other forms of election fraud.
Either we switch to the blockchain based election system or the USA may turn into a totalitarian regime controlled by the Wall Street bankers. Bankers are eager to take the final step. In his 1971 book Between Two Ages, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the architect of several US administrations and the longtime personal assistant of David Rockefeller concluded: “Nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concept of the nation-state. The fiction of sovereignty is clearly no longer compatible with reality”.
It may be the ultimate irony that at the very moment that central banks are reaching the point of the absolute control, the internet and the blockchain technology may erode their very reason for existence. Provided of course, that US voters will stand up and exercise their choice.
