forbes.com
Screven County, Georgia made history on November 5, 2024 when it became the first county in the United States to use the Bitcoin blockchain to safeguard the results of its elections.
The Screven County Board of Elections worked with Simple Proof, a U.S. company that protects digital records using the Bitcoin blockchain, to ensure that their election results couldn’t be altered.
Stacy Scott Mincey, Screven County Election Supervisor, hired Simple Proof to make sure that the handling of votes in her county wasn’t called into question the way it was in another Georgia county during 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.”
What Simple Proof Does
Simple Proof gained notoriety when its immutable proof service was used to safeguard the results of Guatemala’s most recent presidential election, which was detailed in the documentary Immutable Democracy.
Simple Proof uses an open-source protocol called OpenTimestamps, developed by Peter Todd, a former Bitcoin Core developer.
The protocol enables cryptographic timestamping, which uses hash functions to preserve information on Bitcoin’s immutable ledger. The information is stored in the OP_RETURN function of a Bitcoin transaction. This is where the party sending a transaction can include arbitrary information, which is similar to the “memo” space on a physical check.
Anyone can then verify this immutable proof on Simple Proof’s platform or independently in a trustless manner via the Bitcoin blockchain. Put a simpler way, Simple Proof enables the public to verify the election results and other official documents once they’re secured by the Bitcoin blockchain.
Simple Proof And Screven County
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, Elections Lead at Simple Proof, said that his organization worked to make it as easy as possible for Mincey to protect these documents.
“We wanted to make sure that this was painless for Stacy,” Toriello told me in an interview.
He went on to share that all Mincey had to do was email the documents to Simple Proof’s immutable proof service, which automatically timestamped the documents on the blockchain.
The first instance of this timestamping occurred at 7:54 p.m. EST on November 5, 2024 and can be viewed via its Simple Proof verification page.
“Block number 869,047 is the first block in Bitcoin's chain to contain proof of a U.S. election,” said Toriello.
Screven County’s Voting System
While Simple Proof protects voting records, it doesn’t ensure the legitimacy of the votes. In the U.S., this responsibility falls on the local board of elections.
“In Georgia, the Secretary of State does a great job of making sure that the elections are secure,” said Mincey.
“We use machines, but we have paper ballots, too. So, if there’s a problem, we can go back and hand count the paper ballots,” she added.
Mincey went on to share that the machines count the ballots and produce the aforementioned reports. However, she and her team have a means of checking that the reports are at least mostly correct.
“Our county does an audit where we hand count a portion of the ballots to make sure they match what we got from the machine,” said Mincey. “I think that's a great extra step of security that we have to make sure that the elections are valid.”
How Mincey Found Simple Proof
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 group attended Bitcoin 2024 this past July (Mincey couldn’t make the event). The group members met Toriello and Simple Proof’s booth at the conference. Toriello and the Simple Proof team were there raising awareness about how public records can be protected in an immutable manner using Bitcoin.
“Our call to action was Uncle Honey Badger wants you to protect the elections with Bitcoin,” said Toriello with a laugh.
(The Honey Badger, known for its toughness and resilience, is sometimes considered Bitcoin’s mascot.)
One of the group members spoke with Toriello at the event and stayed in touch with him afterwards. In September, Mincey’s meetup group invited Toriello to speak virtually at one of their 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.
Further Implementation Of Simple Proof
Toriello is optimistic after Simple Proof and Screven County’s successful endeavor and would now like to see Georgia implement Simple Proof’s services statewide for its next elections.
“We proved that we can implement this within a week or so in a county,” said Toriello. “Why not do this in every county in the state of Georgia from here on out?”
Mincey, too, would like to see every county in Georgia use Simple Proof. She actually wanted this to be the case in this past election, but time wasn’t on her side.
“I was hoping that I could have introduced it to our state-level people so that it had more widespread use,” she said. “But, this time, there was no time to really get it out statewide.”
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 want this to spread like wildfire as authorities see this is simple to implement and they can afford it,” he added.
“We’re very optimistic.”