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The 2024 US presidential election showcased the public’s growing enthusiasm for prediction markets and citizen journalism. While blockchain-powered offerings promise to give citizens more power than ever before, the most pressing issue impacting the future of our government remains voter privacy and security. Paper systems are expensive and slow, and current electronic voting systems lack privacy, transparency and accessibility, undermining confidence in democracy.
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Enter zero-knowledge proofs: a cryptographic method that provides privacy-preserving, concise, and non-falsifiable proofs that provide a transformative solution for national elections. By enabling verifiable, tamper-proof voting, ZKPs can revolutionize democratic processes, ensuring voter privacy, election integrity, and transparency without relying on trusted authorities. ZKPs have the potential to unlock mathematically secure democracies.
Understanding where and how paper ballots went wrong
Despite technological advances in every function of our daily lives, the voting system in the United States still relies largely on paper ballots. In August of this year, it was even predicted that 98 percent of all votes for the presidential candidates in November would be cast on paper. While paper-based systems are often considered secure, they inherently require trust and leave voter data vulnerable to breaches, misuse and identity theft.
Additionally, traditional systems provide little transparency or mechanisms for voters to verify the integrity of their vote, fueling public skepticism and misinformation. In the 2020 US election, for example, there were widespread allegations, in part because voters had no reliable way to independently verify the results. As we have seen, insecure systems undermine trust and perpetuate myths about electoral integrity.
How traditional methods of electronic voting are flawed systems
Although electronic systems have been introduced to modernize elections and reduce costs, they still pose a significant risk to fair elections and come with compromises in security and trust. That’s because these systems rely on centralized intermediaries, making them vulnerable to manipulation, coercion, and privacy violations.
Early attempts to address these issues, such as blockchain-based systems, introduce decentralization and self-control. However, these blockchain-based systems often fell short of scalability and securing voters’ personal information. The lack of any real privacy inherent in current decentralized blockchain technology risks compromising voter privacy, exposing both a voter’s identity and voting choices, similar to paper or traditional electronic systems.
What is needed is a technological system that can guarantee voter integrity and privacy and prevent tampering, while reducing the data stored on chain – something that allows faster and more efficient vote processing without compromising security . This is where ZKP technology stands out. By solving the trade-off between transparency and privacy while maintaining scalability, ZKPs provide a foundation for secure, verifiable, and efficient voting.
Introducing ZK Proofs: The Next Generation Voter Integrity Solution
ZKPs provide exactly the solution needed to protect voter privacy and enable scalable voting processes. That’s because ZKPs allow a voter to prove their eligibility or exercise the validity of their vote without revealing their identity or vote choice, ensuring both privacy and integrity in the process. To do this, ZKPs rely on mathematical principles that allow the verification of claims, such as the validity of votes in elections, without revealing personal data or sensitive details. Furthermore, ZK off-chain computations can address scalability issues in blockchain-based electronic voting systems. By reducing on-chain storage requirements, this system makes handling large-scale elections feasible while maintaining transparency, privacy, and universal verifiability.
Here’s a more in-depth look at how ZKPs can build mathematically secure democracies and solve problems with existing electronic voting systems:
1. Protection of voter anonymity: ZKPs allow voters to verify the validity of their vote or other documentation without revealing underlying personal data or documents, protecting their privacy. This is made possible by the three components of the ZKP algorithm: completeness, soundness and zero knowledge. Completeness works like this: a statement (X) is true, and both the prover and the verifier follow the protocol correctly, the verifier must accept the proof as true. The evidence cannot be falsified, which guarantees its reliability. Similarly, the soundness component means that if the statement (X) is false, the verifier will not be convinced by the evidence, even if everyone follows the protocol correctly.
2. Enable decentralized record keeping: In a ZKP system, a decentralized and transparent ledger (the blockchain) records votes, ensuring accountability and security.
3. Ensuring transparency and integrity in voting: ZKPs enable a collusion-resistant system that allows voters to verify that their vote was accurately recorded in the count without revealing their voting preferences, ensuring trust and integrity in the voting process.
4. Establish mathematical security: ZKPs provide robust guarantees and confirm that the voting protocol is secure.
Real-world applications of ZKPs in voting
Voting based on the ZKP is no longer theoretical. In October 2024, Georgia’s main opposition party, the United National Movement, launched ‘United Space’, an identity app built by Rarimo, a protocol specialized in decentralized digital identities. This app uses blockchain and ZKPs to ensure secure and anonymous voting, with the aim of combating low turnout by rewarding participation and protecting voters’ identities.
Other projects such as zkPassport, Anon Aandhaar and OpenPassport demonstrate the potential for integrating ZKPs into identity verification systems, proving attributed information such as nationality or age without exposing privacy information.
Existing limitations of ZKP-based identification
While ZKPs offer groundbreaking capabilities for secure voting systems, they still face challenges, most notably their reliance on passports for verification. Passport ownership is not universal: only about 50% of the US population has a valid passport, and in many developing countries the rates are much lower. In addition, passports lack biometric validation, making them susceptible to fraud through stolen or forged documents. Corrupt issuing authorities could theoretically manipulate voting results by creating invalid documents that still pass verification.
Another fundamental challenge lies in the persistence of cryptographic signatures associated with revoked or replaced passports. Even if a document is no longer valid, its digital signature often remains usable, creating the risk of misuse. Finally, many ZKP-based systems rely on a single verification point – typically a passport – rather than merging attestations from multiple sources, such as national ID systems, banking institutions or mobile carriers. This dependency increases the risk of system failure or manipulation.
A solution to these challenges exists by expanding identity verification resources to include attestations from diverse and trusted attestors. Incorporating biometric validation into the passport verification process could significantly reduce the risks associated with stolen or borrowed documents. Additionally, the development of cryptographic standards that allow for the invalidation of outdated signatures would address the vulnerabilities created by revoked or replaced documents.
ZKPs represent a paradigm shift in secure voting, addressing vulnerabilities in traditional and blockchain-based systems. By enabling mathematically secure, privacy-preserving elections, ZKPs have the potential to promote trust, transparency, and participation in democratic processes. As ZKP technology evolves, it has the potential to unlock democracies that are not only secure, but also more inclusive, just and participatory.
This article was co-authored by André OmietanskiAnd Amal Ibraymi.
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Andre Omietanski and Amal Ibraymi
André Omietanski is general counsel at Aztec Labs, which is developing the privacy-first Layer-2 on Ethereum that allows developers to build privacy-preserving applications while ensuring compliance. Andre spent over ten years at White & Case in London, leaving as counsel, where he gained extensive, global and diverse experience in complex traditional financial transactions. Before joining Aztec Labs, he was a crypto advisor to early-stage startups in the Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polkadot ecosystems.
Amal Ibraymi is legal counsel at Aztec Labs, where she supports the company’s legal efforts to advocate for privacy-enhancing technologies and decentralized finance. Prior to joining Aztec, Amal was a privacy associate at Willkie Farr & Gallagher’s New York and Paris offices, where she advised on data protection, cryptography and global privacy compliance. Amal also previously worked at the Office of Legal Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat in New York City, the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, and as a Privacy Fellow at the OECD at its headquarters in Paris. Amal is dually trained in the US and France, with an LLM from NYU School of Law and a JD/MA from Sciences Po Paris.
