Why We're Building Baalot Toward Ethereum

Before Baalot existed as code, it existed as a question: how do you build an election system that no single person — not an IT administrator, not a returning officer, not even the founders of the platform itself — can corrupt?

Traditional software doesn't answer that question. A database can be edited. A server can be taken offline. Audit logs can be wiped. Every centralised system has an administrator, and every administrator is a single point of failure. That's the problem our roadmap is built to close.

To be clear about where we are: today Baalot secures elections with anonymous ballots, server-verified voting, and one-vote-per-verified-identity. Public-blockchain anchoring is on our roadmap, not yet live. This post is about why we're building toward it.

The case for a public blockchain

We want a verification layer with three properties: immutability (once a vote commitment is written, it cannot be changed), public verifiability (any observer can audit the result independently), and decentralisation (no single party controls the record). Public blockchains are the technology we believe satisfies all three simultaneously.

We evaluated four networks — Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and a private Hyperledger deployment. The decision came down to one question: five years from now, which of these will still be running, will still have active security researchers, and will still be economically incentivised to stay honest? Our answer was Ethereum.

Why not Polygon or Solana?

Polygon is faster and cheaper, and we plan to use its infrastructure for transaction relaying. But anchoring vote commitments to Ethereum mainnet is designed to give us a security budget no small startup could otherwise afford. Solana's history of network halts made it a harder fit for election-grade uptime requirements.

A private Hyperledger deployment would have given us full control. But that's exactly the problem — it would have given us full control. The value of blockchain for elections isn't performance; it's the credible commitment that the administrators cannot cheat.

The voter privacy problem

Publishing vote commitments on a public blockchain sounds like it destroys anonymity. It doesn't have to. The design we're building uses a cryptographic commitment scheme: when you vote, a commitment would be written on-chain that proves you participated and that your vote was counted — without ever revealing which candidate you chose. The secret stays on your device and expires the moment the election closes.

The goal isn't to make elections digital. It's to make elections undeniable.

Where we are on the path

The bet we're making on Ethereum isn't about transaction speed or gas costs — those are engineering problems. It's about the idea that when someone loses an election by three votes and demands a recount, they should be able to verify the result themselves, without asking anyone for permission. Today that verification is server-side and auditable by administrators; anchoring it to a public chain that anyone can inspect is the next milestone we're working toward.