From optical scan to Blockchain, the future of voting technology unfolds

In November when more than 100 million Americans select either Kamala Harris, Donald Trump or a third-party candidate as the next president of the United States, exactly how they vote will depend on several factors.

Despite the relatively uniformed portrayal of voting in television and movies, there isn't exactly one standard voting method used throughout the US and, for that matter, much of the world.

The ballot options run the gamut.

There's hand-countered paper ballots, optical scan ballots, punch card ballots, and mail-in ballots to name just a few.

Then you have rare and sometimes extinct methods of voting, such as mechanical lever machines.

"You had a series of toggles with the names of candidates," said Timothy Kneeland, a professor of history, politics and law at Nazareth University in upstate New York.

"When you were done toggling the switches, you pulled a lever which opened a curtain, and that's when the vote was recorded in a mechanical way," he explained, remembering the first election he voted in back in the 1980s.

According to Verified Voting, a non-profit organisation that pushes for the responsible use of technology in elections, mechanical lever voting systems were used by as many as 20 per cent of US voters at their peak, but haven't been used since 2010 due to ageing machines and new technology, such as paper ballots and optical scanning machines.

Yet even when mechanical lever voting machines were at their peak, depending on where US citizens lived and voted, the vote methods widely varied.

That's in part because the US Constitution made elections a state responsibility to a large extent, which led to 50 states deciding how elections unfold.

"Each state gets to decide how elections will be run and they even decide when primaries will be held on the calendar, distinct from one another," explained Prof Kneeland.

"They can also set other laws, for example 36 states have ID laws, so you can't vote unless you show an ID, and some are very strict, it has to be government issued, and some are less strict."

Many states throughout the US also allow early voting, although the window for early voting varies from state to state.

That autonomy given to states is often on full display during the vote counts, with some states quickly able to count votes, and others taking days and even weeks to count and declare a winner.

During the 2000 US presidential election, those state-by-state differences put the spotlight on Florida, where controversies over flawed punch card ballots and confusing butterfly ballots were the subject of several lawsuits, ultimately leading to the defeat of democratic Vice President Al Gore and the victory of his republican challenger George W Bush.

That election took place on November 7, yet wasn't ultimately decided until December 13.

The weeks of controversies from ballot discrepancies and back and forth accusations resulted in the Help America Vote Act (Hava), which, in part, sought to update voting equipment.

That legislation, passed in 2002, hastened the methodical phase out of the punch card ballots and certain voting machines, and gave way to the rise of paper ballots, optical scan readers, and direct recording electronic (DRE) systems.

The DRE systems, however, were initially scrutinised due to occasional glitches and potentially vulnerable memory cards.

To address those concerns, many DRE systems now include what's known as a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), so that voting records can be logged on paper, checked, and tabulated in the event of a recount or concern over vote discrepancy.

According to the MIT Election Data & Science Lab, although the use of DREs spiked following the passage of the Hava, optical scan technology has become a more popular choice, and is used by 77 per cent of the US electorate as of 2020.

"We've become more standard in the last 24 years or so," said Prof Kneeland, referring to how the US votes.

Mail-in, absentee ballots and early voting

Despite an unprecedented amount of technology available to those tasked with organising elections, the tried and true idea of mail delivery has gained traction in various states hoping to make voting easier, while also maintaining vote integrity.

Since 1998, the state of Oregon has conducted its elections by mail-in voting with hopes of increasing voter participation and making the process easier.

California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington and Washington DC also allow for voting by mail without making a special request, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In recent years, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, various states have also sought to increase awareness about absentee voting, which allows citizens the option of voting by mail through a request to local election offices.

For mail-in voting, most of those ballots are counted by optical scan machines.

In addition to the mail-in option, a majority of states in the US also allow for early in-person voting, giving more flexibility to those who may not be able to vote on election day.

Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire, however, do not offer early in-person voting, according to the NCSL.

Blockchain voting?

With the increasing prevalence of blockchain, especially in the world of finance, some have wondered if the technology that revolves around the idea of decentralised and unalterable databases might also offer another way for voters to cast their ballots.

Voatz, a Boston-based company that offers a mobile elections platform using biometrics and a blockchain-based infrastructure, has conducted more than 130 elections for various government bodies, union elections and professional associations, although it's hardly mainstream.

Using the company's smartphone app in areas where Voatz is implemented, voters can use their phones to vote, and then a paper ballot is generated at the local jurisdiction for tabulation.

The anonymised votes, according to a video provided by the company, are locked on a blockchain network for a tamper resistant record and potential election audits.

Voatz boasts that its technology allows users to vote securely from anywhere while also making it possible to make sure votes are counted properly, without identities of voters being revealed.

On its website, the company explains that the Voatz platform is not to be confused with the idea of internet voting.

"Internet voting generally refers to the submission of a ballot on a website from a personal computer (PC). This method is highly insecure, as it can be difficult, or even impossible, to detect whether a PC has been compromised," a statement reads.

"In contrast, Voatz is a mobile application that can only be downloaded to recently manufactured smartphones. These phones need to have several advanced security mechanisms, including fingerprint and facial recognition, which Voatz uses for secure voter identity verification and ballot submission."

Although intriguing but still very much in the nascent stage, the idea of using blockchain technology in elections is not without scrutiny.

"While the notion of using a blockchain as an immutable ballot box may seem promising, blockchain technology does little to solve the fundamental security issues of elections, and indeed, blockchains introduce additional security vulnerabilities," read a report from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine titled Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy.

The report noted that while blockchain proponents often boast about decentralisation, that very idea goes against the grain of how elections work.

"Public elections are inherently centralised," the report explains. "Requiring that election administrators define the contents of ballots, identify the list of eligible voters, and establish the duration of voting."

The authors of the report also point out that the software required to examine the postings on blockchain cold become compromised or might be inadvertently flawed.

"If such software is corrupted, then verifiability may be illusory," it explained.

The future

While it remains to be seen if blockchain voting will ever make its way into the mainstream for major elections, Prof Kneeland said the time is right to leverage all those smartphones in billions of pockets, to increase voter participation.

"I would like to see some sort of electronic voting, not mail, but instead, maybe something on the internet," he said, quickly pivoting to concerns raised by many about potential hacking attempts or vote discrepancies.

"I know a lot of people are concerned about fraud, but if done right, it would be easier for people to vote, and there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to implement a unique sign in technology, that's how we access some government services now," he said, pointing to the proliferation of two-factor authentication processes that could enhance voting security.

Prof Kneeland added that an undiscussed but prevalent barrier to voter participation is a fear of embarrassment in terms of not knowing where to vote, how to request a ballot or how to register, and that a computer or phone based voting method, could remove some of that anxiety.

"It's probably the lead reason why people who haven't voted before are reluctant," he said. "They don't want to look silly."

In its report on vote security, however, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is very cautious about any sort of internet-based voting.

"Conducting secure and credible internet elections will require substantial scientific advances," the report read in part.

Although Prof Kneeland said that it's difficult to see exactly how voting will look in the future given the breakneck pace of technology, he said that it was relatively certain what voting methods wouldn't be prevalent in the years ahead.

The punch card ballots and mechanical lever machines, he said, won't be making a comeback.

"Anything that's going to lead to ambiguity in elections won't be part of the future," he said.

"Particularly in the recent situations where things are so litigious and you've had Democrats and Republicans fighting over every single vote."