"New MIT Paper Roundly Rejects Blockchain Voting as Solution to Election Woes" by Coindesk

DCI Faculty Advisor, Ron Rivest, DCI Director Neha Narula, DCI collaborator Sunoo Park and CSAIL Ph.D candidate Michael Spector’s soon to be released paper, “Going from Bad to Worse: From Internet Voting to Blockchain Voting” was covered in Coindesk’s recent article.

Nov 16, 2020 at 12:01 a.m. ESTUpdated Nov 16, 2020 at 11:30 a.m. EST by Andrew Powers

“As media outlets waited to announce a winner until the Saturday following the U.S. presidential election, calls for how blockchains would have made this process easier emerged, most prominentlyperhaps by  Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, as well as Vitalik Buterin, who added that, though there are technical challenges, the call for a blockchain-based, mobile voting app “is directionally 100% correct.”

A new report from MIT, however, strongly argues against the idea of blockchain-based e-voting, largely on the basis that it will increase cybersecurity vulnerabilities that already exist, it fails meet the unique needs of voting in political elections and it adds more issues than it fixes. 

The report’s authors are Ron Rivest, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) professor and one of the creators of RSA encryption; Michael Specter; Sunoo Park; and Director of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) Neha Narula. The paper will be published in the Journal of Cybersecurity later this month. 

“I haven’t yet seen a blockchain system that I would trust with a county-fair jellybean count, much less a presidential election,” said Rivest in a blog post accompanying the report. “