Louisiana Senate approves blockchain ‘task force’ resolution

Louisiana’s Senate this week passed a concurrent resolution to create a “task force” for exploring the potential uses and economic impact of blockchain technology, a distributed electronic ledger primarily used to record cryptocurrency transactions.

State Sen. Michael “Bike Mike” Fesi, a Republican who worked in the oil and gas industry before starting a political career in 2015, on Wednesday concisely explained his resolution before fellow lawmakers as “a task force for blockchain and digital innovation. Blockchain is going to be a lot for our future and I just think we need to get ahead of it, like the rest of the states are already doing this and we will put this task force together.” The resolution passed the state Senate unanimously.

Louisiana’s 14-member task force appears mostly to be an economic play. The resolution says the task force should “help identify how to attract and retain businesses engaged in digital assets and related technologies, while developing appropriate consumer protections and regulatory clarity” and to assess “the impact of the cryptocurrency industry in the state.” The group would include lawmakers, a financial commissioner, the attorney general, treasurer, workforce commissioner and six representatives from the financial technologies industry.

But the resolution also offers hints of the legislature’s interests when it mentions current uses of blockchain, including “to record transactions, election votes, product inventories, state identifications, and deeds to homes.” Blockchain has been adopted sparingly within state and local government agencies over the past nearly two decades, since it was invented in 2008, though there have been numerous pilots, of limited scope, for tasks like deed tracking and overseas voting.

Though the resolution is “very far from saying we’re implementing internet voting,” said Mark Lindeman, director of policy and strategy at Verified Voting, a nonprofit that promotes policies thought to strengthen the public’s confidence in elections, “it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility someone in the state will want to consider that.” Like the majority of elections experts, Lindeman is opposed to internet voting — “We think it’s bad.” — whether a given proposal uses blockchain or some other technology.

Lindeman pointed to a well-known (in election security circles) paper— “The ballot is busted before the blockchain” — that details the security flaws of Voatz, a now-abandoned, blockchain-based online-voting project that’s since been replaced by one that doesn’t use blockchain. It makes the case that security vulnerabilities apply to digital ballots before they’re ever recorded on the blockchain. “That’s pretty much the expert consensus,” Lindeman said. “Blockchain has one nice property, [which] is that once something is in the blockchain, you can attest to the entire chain of transactions. But that doesn’t actually tell you whether all those votes are correct and valid, so it’s not really clear what problem it solves.”

A Joe Kiniry, who founded the election technologies firm Free & Fair and who’s heading the engineering efforts behind Tusk Philanthropies’ Mobile Voting Project, last year told this publication that blockchain is “nonsense,” but stood firmly behind the protocol his team developed to secure online voting. Opponents of online voting have largely remained unimpressed. Andrew Appel, a computer science professor at Princeton University, last November explained that the issue has to do with the ease with which votes can be changed once computers are involved: “Regular voting on paper isn’t perfect, but you can’t arbitrarily hack huge numbers of votes remotely, with one install, with paper voting. There’s witnesses to every part of it.”

Lindeman said that although the technologies at play may change, “there are folks who are deeply invested in the belief that trust in elections is basically a technical problem they can solve. Unfortunately, trust in elections is not a technical problem. What we’ve seen over and over again is even when there is a technical problem that is solved, not only does that not solve the basic trust problem, but it often creates new problems. It’s turtles all the way down.”