U.S. Postal Service Counters Trump Attacks On Mail-In Voting With A New Blockchain Patent
Chief among Trumps’s complaints against mail-in voting are doubts about whether or not the person whose name is on the ballot actually cast the vote, and whether or not the ballot was tampered with after it was sent. In both instances blockchain offers tantalizing possible solutions. Blockchain identity services are already being widely developed and by moving the vote to a shared, distributed ledger, the votes would transmit almost instantly, drastically reducing the ballot’s vulnerability to tampering. The Postal Service had no comment at the time of publication.
Blockchain technology was utilized at the Utah Republican Convention as well as in Arizona to send delegates to the Republican National Convention after each State decided to hold their conventions remotely. The technology was used in the 2018 West Virginia elections for absentee ballots of overseas military; however, a report by MIT showed potential vulnerabilities of the vendor software.
The USPS Office of Inspector General (OIG) encouraged the Post Office to start looking at the benefits of blockchain technology back in 2016. Four key use cases for blockchain outlined in a report (image below) were 1) Financial Management, 2) Device Management, 3) Identity Services, and 4) Supply Chain Management.