Nir Kshetri, a professor of management at the University of North Carolina, has suggested that before blockchain-based voting tin can be considered safe and trustworthy, some major bug must exist resolved.

In an commodity published on October. 18, Kshetri claims that "small-scale tests run so far have identified problems and vulnerabilities in the digital systems and government administrative procedures" that must be solved before adopting the technology.

Difficult to audit

Per the report, such systems need to verify voters' identities — often past analyzing a portrait photograph or video with facial recognition software. Co-ordinate to Kshetri, contemporary voting tokens are anonymous and cannot be used to trace anyone's identity. He also noted that many of the previous tests involved informal ballots such every bit community projects and educatee government groups.

Kshetri also voiced concerns that "even experts don't have a mode to place every possible irregularity in online voting." On the other hand, he points out that paper-based voting is well-understood and easy to verify and audit.

I major issue is identity verification since various secure keys require big amounts of computing ability to verify. Considering of this, for instance, the initially assigned keys were found to be easy to hack during the last elections in Moscow.

Experts also fear that devices used to vote could exist compromised or that facial recognition systems might brand mistakes or get tricked by hackers. Lastly, proprietary systems like the one developed by blockchain voting startup Voatz do non permit to verify whether the votes were cast accurately.

Testing on a small scale

That being said, in November 2018 multiple election officials in the United states allowed members of the armed forces stationed overseas to vote electronically. In the aforementioned calendar month, 144 voters living abroad have been approved past Due west Virginia's regime to bandage ballots from 31 different countries past means of an app developed by Voatz.

The state reportedly plans to continue and expand the trial in the 2020 presidential election. Besides, 119 voters who were overseas used Voatz's organization to vote during Denver's municipal main elections in May.

The final — and biggest — case of blockchain voting test provided past the commodity is the one used at the beginning of September during the city council elections in Moscow. That beingness said, out of the urban center'due south 20 balloter precincts, just three allowed users to vote via the Cyberspace considering of security concerns.

Every bit Cointelegraph reported on Oct. 18, 2 land counties in the U.S. are implementing blockchain-based mobile voting in the special elections in Nov.