When the 2024 U.S. presidential election campaign kicked off between Democrat nominee and current president Joe Biden versus Republican nominee and former president Donald Trump, many predicted it would be a rough and bumpy ride ahead. Both camps were under fire from serious criticisms: Trump was facing political charges while Biden’s recent media appearances led many to raise concerns about his current fragile state of health. From the get-go, the public knew to expect an intense match between both parties. But no one expected the kind of drama that would unfold.

In case you missed it, here’s a short recap of events:

During the first face-off at the presidential debate last June 27, viewers noticed Joe Biden physically struggling to answer the questions. Critics accused Trump of lying throughout his speech, but Biden’s performance sparked serious doubts about his fitness for the role of Chief Executive. As the Democrat Party discussed whether or not he should withdraw his bid for the presidency, and who, if ever, should take his place, a fatal incident was about to rock the nation just weeks later.

On July 13, during a speech at a Republican rally, Trump was nearly assassinated by a sniper. According to reports, twenty minutes before the incident, local police notified the Secret Service that a suspicious person with a rangefinder was in the area. Rallygoers alerted law enforcers to the presence of a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle on the roof around 410 feet away from where Trump was giving his speech. This was at least two minutes before the first shot was fired.

A Secret Service counter-sniper neutralized the gunman, but by then, Trump and three bystanders had already been shot. Two were in critical condition, and one, 50-year-old firefighter Corey Comperatore, died shielding his family from the open fire. Thankfully, the only injury Trump suffered was a bullet (some say shrapnel) grazing his ear. The shooter, Thomas Crooks, had just bought 50 rounds of ammunition earlier that day, but otherwise showed no indications of committing such an act.

Interestingly, Crooks briefly appeared in a 2022 ad by investment giant and crypto industry leader BlackRock. BlackRock immediately took down the ad after the incident.

In the aftermath, many criticized the Secret Service’s failure to handle the situation, while others speculated it was either an inside job or even a staged performance by the Republican camp. And while experts were still piecing together what went wrong, Biden suddenly announced his decision to bow out of the presidential race—while recovering from COVID-19.

Enter the new presumptive Democrat nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The big question now is who’s gonna win — America’s self-proclaimed “first crypto president” or the first vice president of Asian-American descent who could be the first-ever female president in U.S. history?

Even with Biden out of the picture, many are expecting a close fight between Democrats and Republicans at the polls. According to a survey, the two candidates’ odds of winning are nearly evenly matched, with 46% of respondents planning to vote for Trump and 45% for Harris, respectively.

The next question is a bit more complicated — just how clean and fair will the 2024 U.S. elections be?

To answer that, let’s take a look at some of the issues that plague the system:

Election Fraud

If you think election fraud is only a major problem in developing countries like the Philippines, think again. Apparently, millions of American voters believe that Trump, not Biden, was the actual winner of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. According to them, massive voter fraud was what secured Biden’s win. However, despite filing lawsuits over this, the Republican camp failed to produce hard evidence of these claims.

In another case, leaked surveillance videos showed cases of voter fraud in the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, during the 2019 election. Only 420 people submitted ballots at Bridgeport absentee ballot drop boxes, but at least 1,253 ballots were recorded from there. The court uncovered at least 15 incidents of ballot stuffing by supporters of one of the mayoral candidates, leading to a redo of the city’s mayoral elections earlier this year.

Of course, attempting a redo of the national elections in case something goes wrong would be much, much harder to pull off.

Misinformation

We live in an age where a few viral Twitter posts are all it takes to sway public opinion. Both traditional media and social media have always been prone to bias, fake news, and misinformation, and the prevalence of artificial intelligence these days has only made it much, much easier to fool the public with deepfakes.

Case in point: Trump supporters have allegedly been circulating AI-generated photos of Trump posing with the African-American community to win the hearts of black voters.

An even worse case of AI deception happened in Slovakia in 2023 where an AI-generated audio recording of one of the candidates discussing how to rig the elections via vote-buying began circulating just 48 hours before election day. Although the audio was eventually dismissed as a deepfake, with media outlets observing a moratorium in the lead-up to the elections, there was no way to convince the whole voting population that everything said in that conversation was completely false. It happened to be a tight match between two frontrunners, and that fake audio clip could have been all it took for the candidate’s party to lose.

Network Errors and Cybersecurity Threats

Currently, voting in person through paper ballots is considered the most secure voting method. Though electronic voting is an option, especially for overseas voters and PWDs, the electronic voting machines used in different states are not immune to security threats. Some of the concerns with this method are:

Security: Ballots transmitted online are vulnerable to hacking or denial-of-service attacks that prevent votes from coming through.

Auditability: Without a paper record for counterchecking votes, it is harder to fully audit election results during potential cyberattacks.

Both issues can be solved by using a decentralized system that suffers no downtime and uses an auditable, secure, and immutable ledger for recording all transactions — such as blockchain. 

The Case for Blockchain

Blockchain technology can be used to avoid potential network outages and election fraud on Election Day.

Platforms using centralized technology can be vulnerable to network-wide downtime, errors, or security breaches. For instance, this July, a single automated software update to cybersecurity solution provider CrowdStrike caused devices using Windows to crash, resulting in the largest outage in IT history. Amazon Web Services, Instagram, eBay, Visa, Delta Airlines, and many top banks, media outlets, airlines, and companies worldwide were affected. Thousands of flights were canceled or delayed and around 25% of Fortune 500 companies experienced disruptions costing up to $5.4 billion. The decentralization offered by blockchain technology could help avoid such a scenario. 

The technology could also be used to build public trust.

On March 7, 2018, Sierra Leone became the first country to trial a blockchain-based voting system. This ran independently of the official national tally by the National Election Commission, and 70% of votes nationwide were recorded this way. Votes were anonymously stored in the blockchain ledger and made available for public viewing and auditing.

Estonia, the first country to hold general elections online way back in 2005, considers government data integrity to be one of the foundations of a nation-state. For its leaders, the ability to enforce and verify the integrity of data in real time is crucial to successful governance, and it achieves this by tapping blockchain technology for internet voting, smart IDs, e-governance, taxation, and other public services.

For countries like the U.S., where millions of PWDs could benefit from online paperless voting but different government agencies discourage electronic voting due to security issues, the security of blockchain technology could be a real game changer.

Paul Soliman, CEO of BayaniChain proposed the use of blockchain technology for vote counting to ensure transparency during upcoming Philippine elections. The idea is each voter will receive a unique, verifiable NFT that can be used to track their vote, and any attempts to edit a vote that has been cast will immediately be detected by the algorithm. For added security, votes from each precinct will be validated by third-party validators.

Provided we develop the infrastructure needed, it can help avoid the age-old “dinaya ako” controversy that pops up every election season. (More on that in a previous article.)

Criticisms Against Blockchain

Despite its benefits, incorporating blockchain with nationwide elections isn’t foolproof. 

Critics of blockchain-based voting argue that blockchains are just as vulnerable to security attacks. Entering the data into the blockchain is one of the biggest areas of concern, since the voter information in public databases may already be compromised to begin with. Furthermore, malware could also target the data while it’s being moved to the blockchain. To avoid network congestion, many blockchain networks use sidechains or execute the bulk of transactions off-chain before moving the data on-chain. Until the data gets recorded on the blockchain itself, it can be vulnerable to threats.

Also, even if a blockchain is a distributed network, if enough servers are compromised, the integrity of the voting results will be affected. Granted, it’s not easy for a hacker to successfully breach 51% of the servers in a huge public blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but in a private network which relies on a few authorized participants to carry out most of the work, this scenario is quite possible.

Taking all these into consideration, we can assume that even though this year, the U.S., the Philippines, and most of the world don’t have the infrastructure, information dissemination, and systems in place to successfully execute fully blockchain-based nationwide voting, it can potentially be the backbone of trustworthy, transparent, and modernized elections in the future.

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‍See Also: Exploring Crypto’s Impact on the U.S. Elections