Claims that "voting on the blockchain" would increase election security have been found wanting and even dubbed "misleading" by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In their paper Going from Bad to Worse: From Internet Voting to Blockchain Voting published on Monday, they wrote that internet and blockchain-based voting would "greatly increase the risk of undetectable, nation-scale election failures".
"I haven't yet seen a blockchain system that I would trust with a county-fair jellybean count, much less a presidential election," said the senior author, Institute Professor Ron Rivest of MIT's renowned Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Rivest is best known as the "R" in the RSA encryption algorithm.
The paper analyses and systematises previous research on the security risks of voting systems, both online and offline, and comes to a clear conclusion.
Blockchain technology doesn't solve the fundamental security problems suffered by all electronic voting systems, and may introduce even more problems, the researchers wrote.
Blockchain solutions are "ripe" for what they call "serious failures". These are situations where election results might have been changed, either through error or by an attacker. The change might be undetectable, or even if it's detected, the only solution would be to run a whole new election.
"Exposing our election systems to such serious failures is too high a price to pay for the convenience of voting from our phones," they wrote.
"What good is it to vote conveniently on your phone if you obtain little or no assurance that your vote will be counted correctly, or at all?"
In any event, electronic systems of any kind, blockchain or not, are more susceptible to large-scale attacks because exploiting a single vulnerability could impact every ballot at