Blockchain Election Certification

When I took office as Secretary of State of Nevada in 2023, I knew we had to take these threats seriously and stand up for the integrity of our election systems. Nevada runs some of the most secure, transparent and accessible elections in the country. As a battleground state, we know there are people who will try to attack that security and accessibility. 

Technology is advancing rapidly, as is the potential for cyberattacks. In Nevada, my office announced the integration of cutting-edge blockchain technology to bolster election security and to solidify our commitment to being at the forefront of innovation.  

Nevada took this bold step as a way to reassure voters at a time when claims of fraud and election conspiracies are rampant. While there’s no proof of widespread fraud, as election integrity continues to come under attack, administrators need to find creative solutions for assuring the public that their vote is secure. The model we’ve piloted can help provide a path for others to follow.

Blockchain is most commonly associated with cryptocurrency, but it can be applied to a variety of uses and platforms. It’s a distributed ledger—a decentralized digital database—that maintains records (blocks) securely linked together with unique, fixed-length “fingerprints.” Each block is linked with a cryptographic hash from the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data that gets carried forward through the chain. This process makes the blockchain resistant to fraud, because the data in any previous block cannot be changed without altering all subsequent blocks in the chain.

Nevada implemented blockchain to secure the Certificate of Ascertainment, a crucial document in the presidential election as it certifies the electors who will cast their votes. Our six electoral votes are not only significant in representing the will of the people of Nevada; they could potentially determine who will become the next president. In a close race, Nevada can swing the outcome. Blockchain enhances the integrity of this process.

Government agencies face limited resources and confront slow-moving bureaucracies; it can be nearly impossible to keep up with the latest systems and protections available to the private sector. But few things are more crucial to a functioning democracy than election integrity. That’s why we launched a number of initiatives to ensure voters and election workers could safely cast their ballots. 

In 2023, we passed the Election Worker Protection Act, which makes it a felony to threaten, harass, or intimidate election workers. This was passed unanimously in the legislature and signed promptly by the governor—sending a clear message that Nevada will not stand for attacks on our election workers or the electoral process. The following year, we implemented a statewide voter-registration and election-management system, streamlining the voter experience at the polls and significantly increasing the security of our election systems across all of Nevada’s 17 counties by increasing the transparency of critical data for the general public. 

On Election Day, another issue arose: A significant number of mail-in ballots couldn’t be counted owing to an issue with signature verification. When a voter’s signature on the ballot doesn’t match the one on file, county election officials must contact the voter to confirm their identity before the ballot is counted. This is an important step, and we knew local county workers would need our help in reaching voters. So we set up a website for voters to confirm their identities and verify ballots online. If a voter had included a cell-phone number in their registration file, we sent a text message to verify the ballot. Through that targeted outreach, 58% of voters texted were able to verify ballots and have their votes count.

Innovation and modernization are at the forefront of all of these efforts, ensuring our voters’ voices can be heard, their votes are secure, and we have a smooth election cycle.

After Election Day, we knew our work wasn’t done; certification is one of the most vital steps in the process. While not a very well-known aspect of elections, like many of the duties of election officials, in the 2024 cycle it became the subject of much speculation and critique. We wanted to figure out how to further enhance the security of our documents while assuring the public we were taking significant measures to protect every link in the chain.

That’s why we implemented blockchain. In Nevada, the secretary of state is required to meet with a majority of the members of the state Supreme Court to canvass the vote. The Certificate of Ascertainment is then first signed by the governor and secretary of state to certify the presidential electors, before being sent to the archivist of the United States and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Finally, the electors hold the meeting of the Electoral College to cast their votes for the presidential and vice presidential candidates who received the most votes in the state of Nevada.

The passage of the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA) requires that the certificate include a second layer of security, to ensure the original document is valid. Some examples of this validation in other states have included the use of a watermark or special seal. Since the blockchain securely stores records across a worldwide network of computers in a way that’s transparent and immutable, we were confident that this would make the validation process impervious to fraud.  

The technology was first used by the Nevada secretary of state’s office in 2023 for a smaller program that the office administers: domestic partnership registrations. These documents are very important to the people who need access to them; using the blockchain to record a registration makes the original, authentic document accessible at any time, without having to contact the office. The secretary of state’s office partnered with the company Titan Seal to offer this new service. No special technology is needed for the public to use it, and all the security is handled behind the scenes. Each certified document is designated by a unique, verifiable number, or “hash.” A single pixel of difference on a document would cause it to fail verification. 

After seeing the success of the integration of blockchain in this program, we knew it would be a tool we could utilize across our agency, and to close out the election cycle. 

At the Nevada secretary of state’s office, we are committed to running the most secure elections in the country. By incorporating blockchain technology into the certification process, we took that commitment to the next level, protecting against counterfeits by implementing a process that is both transparent and trustworthy and makes it much more difficult to alter these vital documents. The challenges facing election officials are nearly endless, but we can take innovative steps to strengthen our already safe and secure elections for citizens. We were proud to lead the nation by utilizing this emerging technology to protect the integrity of our elections.