Screven County, Georgia made history on November 5, 2024 by being the first county in the United States to use the Bitcoin blockchain to support its election results.
The Screven County Board of Elections worked with Simple Proof, a U. S. company that protects virtual records on the Bitcoin blockchain, to make sure that the effects of their elections cannot be changed.
Stacy Scott Mincey, Screven County Election Supervisor, hired Simple Proof to ensure the handling of votes in her county would not be challenged as it was in other Georgia counties in the 2020 elections.
“One of my goals was to do everything I could to make sure that people in the county felt secure, that their votes counted, especially with the heightened concerns around security and voter fraud,” Mincey told me in an interview. “Using Simple Proof was just one more step that we took to make sure that our results could not be tampered with in any way.”
Simple Proof gained notoriety when its immutable evidence service used to support the effects of the last presidential election in Guatemala, which were detailed in the documentary Immutable Democracy.
Simple Proof uses an open-source OpenTimestamps protocol, developed through Peter Todd, a former Bitcoin Core developer.
The protocol enables cryptographic timestamping, which uses a hash server to maintain data on Bitcoin’s immutable ledger. The data is stored on the OP_RETURN server as from a Bitcoin transaction. This is where the party sending a transaction can include arbitrary data, to the “memo” area of a physical control.
Anyone can then check this immutable evidence on the Simple Proof platform or independently and without accepting it as true via the Bitcoin blockchain. In simpler terms, Simple Proof allows the public to determine the effects of elections and other official documents once they are secured through the Bitcoin blockchain.
In the case of the Screven County elections, the information stored on the blockchain was the Election Summary Reports, which contain vote tallies, and the Statement of Votes Cast, which provides a county-wide overview of election results and other election details.
Carlos Toriello, Simple Proof’s election director, said his organization is running to make it as easy as possible for Mincey to protect those documents.
“We wanted to make sure that this was painless for Stacy,” Toriello told me in an interview.
He then explained that all Mincey had to do was email the documents to Simple Proof’s immutable evidence service, which automatically timestamped the documents on the blockchain.
The first example of this timestamp occurred at 7:54 p. m. EST on November 5, 2024, and can be viewed on its Simple Test verification page.
Screenshot of Simple Proof’s Document Verification Portal
“Block number 869,047 is the first block on the Bitcoin chain to include evidence of an election in the United States,” Toriello said.
While undeniable evidence protects voting records, it ensures the legitimacy of votes. In the United States, this duty falls to the local election board.
“In Georgia, the Secretary of State does a great job of making sure that the elections are secure,” said Mincey.
“We use machines, we also have ballot papers. So if there’s a problem, we can manually return and count the ballots,” he added.
Mincey continued that the machines counted the ballots and produced the aforementioned reports. However, she and her team have a way of making sure the reports are, at least in most cases, correct.
“Our county does an audit where we manually count a portion of the ballots to make sure they fit what the machine gave us,” Mincey said. “I think this is an additional security measure that we want to ensure during the validity of the election. “
Not only does Mincey have a deep knowledge of how voting works in her state, but she’s also quite familiar with Bitcoin. And it’s actually because of Bitcoin that she met Toriello.
Members of Mincey’s Meetup organization attended Bitcoin 2024 last July (Mincey was unable to attend the event). Members of the organization learned about Toriello and Simple Proof’s booth at the conference. Toriello and the Simple Proof team were there to raise awareness about how public ledgers can immutably employ Bitcoin.
“Our call to action that Uncle Honey Badger sought to protect the election with Bitcoin,” Toriello said with a laugh.
(The honey badger, known for its tenacity and resilience, is known as Bitcoin’s mascot. )
Promotional image from Simple Proof’s “Protect the Elections” campaign.
One of the organization’s members spoke with Toriello at the time and stayed in touch with him afterward. In September, Mincey’s Meetup organization invited Toriello to speak at one of its meetings.
“He spoke at the meeting, and afterwards I started talking to him because I was very intrigued about how we could ensure that our results were verified,” said Mincey. “I was just blown away at how they used Simple Proof in Guatemala.”
In late October, Mincey proposed using Simple Proof at a board meeting, and the board voted in favor of it. Mincey contacted Toriello, and the rest is now history.
Toriello is positive after the good fortune of Simple Proof and Screven County and would now like to see Georgia put Simple Proof into effect statewide for its next election.
“We proved we can implement this in about a week in one county,” Toriello said. “Why not do this in every single county in the state of Georgia from now on? »
Mincey would also like to see all Georgia counties use Simple Testing. She sought to make that the case in the last election, but the weather was not on her side.
“I was hoping to be able to provide it to our officials in the state so that it can be used more widely,” he said. “But this time we didn’t have time to spread it throughout the state. “
Toriello also has his sights set beyond Georgia.
“We’ve already made inroads in a bunch of different places around the whole country,” said Toriello, who believes that more counties and states will see the value in what Simple Proof offers after this success story in Screven County.
“I need this to spread like wildfire, because the Government sees that it is undeniable that it is going to apply it and that it can do it,” he added.
“We’re very optimistic.”
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