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Professor Richard Holden thinks exploring distributed ledger technology for voting in US elections could put voter fraud lawsuits to bed.
Richard Holden, an economics professor at the University of New South Wales Business School, says using distributed ledger technology could allay Republican concerns over mail-in voter fraud â but would likely benefit the Democratic Party.Â
Holden spoke at the Unitize conference on July 9 on The Law and Economics of Blockchain. The university professor said distributed ledger technology (DLT) has the potential to increase voter turnout and have a âmeaningful effectâ on the outcome of U.S. elections â but there are still issues around the overall integrity of the process.
Screen capture from Unitize
The UNSW professor cited Republican lawsuits against voting by mail, which Democrats believe will increase voter turnout. The results of Holdenâs own study, conducted with a colleague in Massachusetts, found that in populations where there was a lower cost on voter registration and turnout (that is, it was easier to vote) tended to mean the addition of new voters that leaned to the left.Â
âDistributed ledger technology might be an interesting defense against the idea of there being fraud with vote by mail,â Holden said. âBut DLT could in principle be more even immune to those considerations. So itâs going to play a very important role going forward because it has a potential political skew â not by intent, but just by implication.â
Blockchain: immutable, not invulnerableÂ
However, a 2018 report from the The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says blockchain technology âdoes little to solve the fundamental security issues of electionsâ and introduces âadditional security vulnerabilities." The group stated that malware installed on a voterâs device had the potential to alter a vote before blockchain even reached blockchain.
Though Holden did allude to West Virginia employing blockchain voting during its 2018 midterm elections, he did not mention that local authorities switched back to more traditional voting methods following a security audit by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2020. Its report revealed âvulnerabilities that allow different kinds of adversaries to alter, stop, or expose a user's vote.â
The economics professor said the matter was a charged issue likely to create change, but one way or another, âelection law will have to adapt.â
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