If democracy were designed today

Transcript

Auto-generated captions, lightly tidied.

Introduction

Good afternoon. My name is Jamie Skella and I'm the co-founder of a blockchain based voting technology startup called Horizon State. I've travelled all the way from Australia, not just for this, but doing a bit of a tour of our technology and our mission across Asia, in South Korea, in Europe, in Ukraine, and now here on the west coast of the US, having just come from New York to talk to the United Nations and their sustainability goals about this: redesigning democracy on the blockchain.

About a year and a half ago I started working with an Australian not-for-profit democratic movement named MiVote. Throughout their process we were thinking about ways to achieve some of their goals, which ultimately was about polling a constituency with immediacy and regularity, through a mobile device or a personal computer, but finding a way to do that in a secure manner.

What we were asking ourselves was this. If the founders of our nations, and indeed our enterprises and our capitalist institutions, were designing the democratic processes and tools today, what would that look like? If they could leverage blockchain, and the internet, and smartphones, how would they do things differently?

It's pretty safe to say they would not be asking everybody in a constituency to gather at a centralised location such as a polling booth, do so once every four years, write on a piece of paper, throw that into a box, and then pray that their representatives are representing them. They would probably see that there are better ways to do it, better ways to engage a constituency, and do it with immediacy and security.

We live in a world where driverless cars are on the verge of reality, and in fact they are here, and they are going to get more and more sophisticated in the very near term. Yet the way we govern our societies, and the way we govern our institutions, including corporate ones, remains a century or two old relic. It's outdated, and there's no excuse anymore to be orchestrating ourselves and pursuing these kinds of democratic processes in the ways we currently do.

The Australian postal vote

To give you some real world examples of the inefficiencies and problems that face our current processes: in Australia right now we have a national postal vote underway. The government is posting out votes in envelopes to every eligible voter in the entire country, at significant cost to the Australian taxpayer, in the vicinity of 122 million dollars. It costs so much because the orchestration of such an archaic process is long and slow, requires a lot of people, and it's also insecure. We've seen hundreds and thousands of postal votes left out in the rain, votes that will now not be counted.

If we were to use the blockchain to run a similar process with modern, secure digital frameworks, we'd be able to strip at least one and a two off that number. We'd be talking about something in the vicinity of 2 million, as opposed to 122 million. I'll talk more about the tech and security in a moment, but the cost saving is significant.

Voter apathy

Here in America voting isn't compulsory, and about half of the nation don't bother to vote. There are lots of reasons for voter apathy, including feeling that your vote doesn't matter, or feeling that you're not well informed enough to make a decision. But the reality is that the further away from a polling position any individual is, the more it statistically increases the likelihood that they won't bother to vote. There's a tremendous inconvenience in this process, especially if you feel your vote isn't going to make a difference anyway.

Again, with smartphones in our pockets, and the internet and blockchain as an underlying technology, we can help mitigate this reality, improve turnout, and hopefully improve outcomes as well.

Digital voting

Then there are our current attempts at digital voting. We have e-voting machines still in centralised locations, and we have online voting as well, but right now cast to centralised, insecure servers. We might be using the internet for a vote, be it within an organisation, an AGM, a start-up pitch night, or something governmental like an electoral process, or a poll like the same-sex marriage one being undertaken in Australia right now. But when it's cast to a centralised server, we still have a central point of failure, a single point that attack vectors can be applied to, and where the result can be compromised.

To recap where we are right now: the process of soliciting votes in traditional ways is expensive. Setting up polling booths and asking people to come and drop pieces of paper in a bucket every few years costs approximately seven dollars per voter, and as high as 25. Those geographically centralised methods of participation are also slow to orchestrate, which increases price, and they increase voter apathy, because a lot of people don't want to have to go there and do that. And last but not least is the insecurity of current electronic voting systems, whether centralised or over the internet.

So the solutions that now exist, and that we've been working on at Horizon State, include, first and most profound, an unhackable ballot box: a record of the vote that cannot be changed. For the first time in history we have the opportunity to create a record of a vote that cannot be tampered with. There's no way to change it, reverse it or alter it. It is set in stone. That provides a huge amount of confidence to a constituency, and changes how we orchestrate ourselves and the level of trust applied to everyday interactions. It's a society-changing technology for many reasons, but voting in particular, from my perspective, is one of the most important.

Convenient voting via smartphone is a bit of a no-brainer, and technically we can already do it, but without that blockchain piece it's insecure, there isn't necessarily any trust in the result, and there's a lot of warranted concern about doing so. And lastly, by using these technologies, the smartphone in our pocket or a shared library computer, and the blockchain that creates an unhackable ballot box, we're able to reduce costs to the taxpayer. So instead of spending 122 million dollars on that postal vote, we're only spending a couple of million, if that.

Blockchain

For those not familiar with blockchain and how it works, I published an article a while ago called “A blockchain explanation your parents could understand”. Apologies for the ageist statement, but I came up with the title when I was thinking about explaining blockchain to my parents, and they got it, so I think it was accurate enough.

Using the reference of a centralised digital ballot box, casting a vote to one location on the internet, a centralised database, even if it's on a cloud network, you're just replicating that one point of failure. And only one point needs to be compromised to change the result or pursue some kind of malicious activity.

Bitcoin is built atop probably the first mainstream blockchain, and it provides the opportunity to avoid that pitfall entirely. In the case of financial transactions using Bitcoin, instead of sending your request for a transaction to an intermediary, a centralised point of trust, it goes out to the crowd. Hundreds of machines, hundreds of nodes, look at that transaction, ensure it's valid, and add it to a distributed ledger effectively simultaneously. They've reached consensus. They agree that this is reality, and that's the reality all of them are now wedded to. Changing the result is, at the moment, based on computational power, impossible. That may change with quantum computing, but for now the idea that you could set up enough computational power to corrupt the network, by trying to modify all of those records at once, all around the world, is far fetched.

A real-world example that might be more relatable: say we have Joe and Sue, and Joe wants to give Sue a couple of dollars. They don't want to involve a bank, so instead 200 of their most trusted associates, friends, colleagues and family members, stand around. They've all got record books and they witness this transaction of two dollars from Joe to Sue, recorded at the same time. They've reached consensus. They've seen where it's come from, where it's going, the value and other characteristics, and they've reached agreement. Now if one of these people wanted to claim it was 200 and not two dollars, the rest of the network would disagree. It wouldn't be allowed; it would be rejected. That's what we're talking about with using the blockchain for an unforgeable integrity system. What we're doing is replacing those Bitcoin financial transactions with votes, and we get all the same benefits.

The vote

We've been doing this since February of this year. MiVote has run four nationally inclusive votes using our blockchain-based voting technology, and done so successfully. We're now looking at commercialising this on a global scale.

This is a bit of an unfair comparison, but sometimes unfair comparisons are the most important ones. We have a traditional ballot box: centralised, still not that secure, a great inconvenience to people needing to use it, and hundreds of years old. This is the way we've done things forever, as long as democracy has existed. We have a current online ballot box: an SQL centralised database, exploitable; it has some convenience gains but is arguably even less secure than the paper ballot box. And now, finally, thanks to blockchain technology and the systems I've just described in layman's terms, we're able to create a distributed, secure digital ballot box, which means the result is tamper proof. It cannot be changed. There's no question of the result. There is trust, thanks to technology.

Trust

I've talked a lot about governmental purposes, elections and so forth, but this technology is applicable anywhere a secure vote is important. We're working with global NGOs and multinational institutions. In fact, I'm very proud to say we've just signed our partnership paperwork with SAP, and we'll be venturing into the world of multinationals, looking at existing processes for annual general meetings and board votes, and polling national and international constituencies about matters of conservation and matters of spend. Wherever the result needs to be trusted and secure, we now have a technology to achieve that and deliver trust to everybody involved.

In closing

In closing, I hope you find it just as profound as I do that, thanks to this technology, we're on the verge of something very special in the way society organises itself. Blockchain is providing enormous opportunity in many industries, for many applications. The big one for me is voting and democratic processes. I think historic change is now on the horizon, and we have the opportunity to seriously and legitimately eradicate corruption from our election processes on a global scale. Thank you.