Vote Coin Protocol Proposes Paper Ballot Audits on Cardano

Michael Twigg presented Vote Coin Protocol on the Cardano Forum on October 1, inviting technical review of a proposed paper ballot voting system. The published design covers election procedures, privacy protections, and testing plans. It is neither certified nor deployed.

Paper Ballots and a Public Cardano Audit Trail

Vote Coin Protocol proposes in-person voting with a public audit trail for individual ballots. Voter-verified paper ballots would remain the basis for determining election results.

Voters would review their printed ballots before depositing them. A separate scanner would read the printed selections and compare them with the device’s digital record.

Each record would receive a SHA-256 fingerprint combined with a secret random value, making it difficult to infer ballot contents from the fingerprint.

Fingerprints from multiple ballots would be combined into a Merkle tree. Its root summarizes the batch while allowing an individual record’s inclusion to be checked. That root would be anchored on Cardano, with voting choices, names, and personal information remaining off-chain.

A receipt would let voters check whether their ballot’s fingerprint appeared in an anchored batch. This verifies record inclusion; election totals would still come from the paper ballots.

Vote Coin Records the Use of a Voting Right

The initial model would issue one native Cardano token for each registered voting right. Tokens would remain locked at a Plutus validator address, with spending restricted to authorized burns.

Following a recorded vote, the token would be burned to create public evidence that the right had been exercised. Polling-place check-in would continue to prevent a second ballot during voting itself.

Voters would need no crypto wallet and would pay no transaction fees. The election budget would fund fees in ADA. ADA locked alongside a token would return to the election authority when it was burned.

Individual token burns are proposed for the first two pilot phases. From the third phase, spent credential tags would instead appear in batch records anchored through their cryptographic roots. Voting would remain local, with blockchain publication occurring afterward, allowing an anchor to wait during network congestion.

Plutus Review and Testnet Measurements Requested

Twigg has asked Cardano developers to examine the burn-only validator, blockchain load estimates, and burn transaction size. His forum post specifically requests testnet measurements to assess the document’s assumptions.

The public repository includes the white paper, worked examples, and Python verification scripts. Those scripts recompute ballot fingerprints, Merkle inclusion proofs, and estimated network load using illustrative ballots and stated Cardano parameters.

The published checks cover the document’s calculations. The requested network measurements concern actual transaction size and validator behavior.

If a discrepancy emerged after filing, the design would require correcting the digital record to match the voter-reviewed paper ballot and publicly logging the difference.