With the current focus on voter eligibility and ID requirements in discussions around the SAVE Act, I think we are asking the wrong question.
The harder and more important problem is not just who can vote, but how we secure and verify the vote itself end to end.
A few years ago, I served as CTO on a blockchain voting feasibility study alongside a former DOJ division head, a western state Secretary of State, and other public sector stakeholders.
Conclusion:
From a technical and process standpoint, secure blockchain-based voting is feasible today.
It is already being used in limited, non federal contexts, primarily pilot programs and specific voter groups such as overseas or military voters.
What a modern system could look like (high level)
Immutable vote recording:
Votes are written to a tamper evident ledger with strong audit guarantees. Once recorded, they cannot be altered without detection.
Private voter identity with verifiable inclusion:
- Each voter receives a one time credential or token. Identity is verified at issuance, but ballots remain secret and unlinkable to the voter.
- End to end verifiability, including the individual voter
- Each voter can independently verify that their vote was recorded exactly as cast and included in the final tally.
- This is a critical distinction. Not just trusting the system, but being able to confirm your specific vote is present and unchanged without revealing your identity.
Public auditability:
Independent observers can verify the full election tally from the ledger without needing to trust a central authority.
Paper audit trail
Electronic voting produces a human verifiable paper record. This allows physical recounts and aligns with current election security best practices.
Optional remote voting layer:
With strict controls such as liveness detection, device binding, and risk scoring. This is the most controversial piece, but technically achievable in constrained use cases.
What this improves:
- Stronger auditability and transparency
- True end to end verification, including at the individual voter level
- Increased voter confidence, since voters are not asked to trust the system blindly
- Faster and more reliable tabulation
- Potentially improved accessibility, especially for overseas and disabled voters
The reality (why you do not see this widely deployed) :
This was not a technical failure. It was a go to market and governance problem:
- Elections are state controlled, not federalized
- Voting infrastructure is tied to long term vendor contracts, often around 10 year cycles
- Procurement cycles are slow, risk averse, and highly regulated
- The political and operational risk of changing voting systems is extremely high
In short, there is a high barrier to entry, low commercial upside, and high scrutiny.
Important nuance (often missed in public discussions):
- Blockchain does not solve identity on its own
- Identity verification remains the hardest problem
- Verifiability must be designed carefully
- The system must allow a voter to confirm their vote without enabling coercion or vote selling
- It does not eliminate the need for paper trails
- Strong systems explicitly include them
- Remote or mobile voting is the highest risk component, not the ledger itself
My take :
If we are going to debate voter ID, we should also be debating modernizing the voting infrastructure itself.
A standardized, universally accepted ID, combined with systems that allow every voter to verify their vote was recorded correctly and counted, would materially improve election integrity.
The technology is not the limiting factor.