If they squinted hard enough, attendees of the International Centre for Parliamentary Studies’ annual Electoral Symposium, which took place in late May at the Troia Design Hotel, 90 minutes south of Lisbon, Portugal, could just about see the future of democracy taking shape.

As usual, credentialed participants — electoral officials from around the world, staff from various NGOs, and an array of eager vendors — could play with the latest suitcase ballot scanners, price out indelible inks, and peruse an array of tamper-resistant security seals, the time-honored instruments of elective governance.

“It’s funny because most people don’t know too much about blockchain, but they know it’s brilliant.”

But this year there was something different in the air: heated talk of a new technology, ingenious in its design, far-reaching in its implications: the blockchain.

The stodgy, buttoned-up world of representative democracy has come down with a touch of crypto fever, a giddy hope that the same elegant mathematical contraption that powers bitcoin and Ethereum might somehow be employed to reinvigorate the democratic process, liberate the masses, and save the world.

“People think it’s a kind of magic lantern,” Mike Summers, program director for online voting at elections services provider Smartmatic, tells me between sessions. “Like it’s going to solve everything. It’s funny because most people don’t know too much about [the blockchain], but they know it’s brilliant.” Smartmatic is hard at work trying to find ways to incorporate blockchain technology into its own offerings.

At democracy’s heart lies a set of paradoxes: a delicate interplay of identity and anonymity, secrecy and transparency. To be sure you are eligible to vote and that you do so only once, the authorities need to know who you are. But when it comes time for you to mark a ballot, the government must guarantee your privacy and anonymity. After the fact, it also needs to provide some means for a third party to audit the election, while also preventing you from obtaining definitive proof of your choice, which could lead to vote selling or coercion.

Building a system that accomplishes all this at once — and does so securely — is challenging enough in the physical world. It’s even harder online, as the recent revelation that Russian intelligence operatives compromised voting systems in multiple states makes clear. But that hasn’t stopped tech companies from trying. According to a report by the Wharton School, election administration is said to be a $1 billion per year industry in the United States alone (that’s just for infrastructure and technology). Worldwide, according to industry insiders, the figure is likely between $8 billion and $10 billion. And given the hype around the blockchain, it’s hardly surprising that the top players are turning to the technology in hopes of fortifying their systems and winning the trust of leery officials.

Though none would say so openly, they were also staking their claim amid a gold rush that has already transformed teens into millionaires and sleepy iced-tea companies into stock-market juggernauts. In the decade since the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto published an infamous white paper outlining the idea behind bitcoin, a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” based on a mathematical “consensus mechanism,” more than 1,500 new cryptocurrencies have come into being. The idea has been applied to contracts, record keeping, insurance, fine art, the news media, and cats.

Some evangelists even believe the blockchain will power a whole new internet based on a true peer-to-peer architecture that will restore the utopian promise of the web’s early days. Why shouldn’t a system based on “cryptographic proof instead of trust,” as Nakamoto put it, redeem our faith in the democratic process as well?

By half past 1:00 on the first day, conference attendees had taken in a keynote, a presentation (“Elections in the Cyber Age: How Digital Democracy Is Improving Election Integrity”), and a panel discussion (“Blockchain Technology, Smartphone Apps, E-Voting: What Are the Implications for the Future of Democracy?”); posed for a group picture; and traded war stories over lunch. Through it all, the booth for Votem Inc., one of several vendors offering “internet voting solutions,” sat unmanned.

Pete Martin, president and chief executive of the Cleveland-based online voting company, and his director of testing and certification, David Wallick, had one of those trips: a delayed flight, a missed connection, an improvised rerouting. (The guy dispatched by Facebook appears to have had a similar issue, if that company’s empty display table is any indication.) Fortunately, like all good startups, Votem was agile. Arriving at the hotel just 45 minutes before they were scheduled to lead a blockchain workshop of their own, Martin and Wallick speedwalked to the meeting room, plugged in a laptop, and were ready to make their case, with minutes to spare.

Martin, a serial entrepreneur who got his start as a teenage auto-leasing magnate in Cleveland before moving on to custom computer sales and an MBA, planted his feet confidently and fired up his pitch deck as a crowd of 50 or so attendees listened attentively.

Voting is “broken,” he said, as the screen behind him flashed a famous image from 2000 of Florida election officials diligently trying to decipher a voter’s intent from the so-called hanging chad on a mispunched card. For people who have devoted themselves to promoting democratic ideals, it was a cringe-inducing moment.

Moving on, Martin talked about the decline of trust in government. He explained how the cycle of fear and doubt can lead to unchecked populism (Brexit, Trump, etc.). He touched on the challenge voters have in accessing polling places and highlighted the issue of low turnout.

Several audience members nodded thoughtfully.

Martin, 55, who has the look of a high school principal, poised and professional, with a Mitt Romney–esque touch of gray at his temples, first became interested in online voting after selling his fifth company, a B-to-B software consulting firm. Casting around for his next challenge, Martin signed up for an executive summit in Los Angeles. It was led by the serial entrepreneur and futurism guru Peter Diamandis. As part of an exercise designed to identify participants’ “massively transformative purpose,” Martin recalls, he was asked to write down “what I’d do before I die that would positively impact a billion people.”

He stared at a blank sheet of paper for five long minutes. “Then I wrote down the magical words: mobile voting.”

This was December 2014. Martin knew nothing about the election services industry, but no matter. He hired people, bought a small online-voting outfit that had developed its own proprietary software, and before long, turned his commitment into an audacious pledge: By 2025, Martin vowed, 1 billion people would cast a ballot on what would become the Votem platform. So far, he’s up to 8.5 million, which includes a number of small public elections (Montana and the City of Detroit have used Votem’s technology), as well as internal political party votes, union elections, and the recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame fan poll (way to go, Bon Jovi).

The real prize, of course, is national elections, which is what brought Martin to Portugal: the chance to run elections for various democracies around the world and one day — who knows? — help select a U.S. president. Martin’s pitch boiled down to internet-based voting via personal devices or on touchscreens in polling places, but with a twist: Votes cast through Votem would be recorded on the blockchain — digital, distributed, immutable.

At democracy’s heart lies a set of paradoxes: a delicate interplay of identity and anonymity, secrecy and transparency.

In the past year or so, explaining the concept of a blockchain has become a cottage industry in itself (check out YouTube). The most helpful formulation I’ve encountered is the one offered by Nathan Heller in the New Yorker, in which he compares the blockchain to a scarf knit with a single ball of yarn. “It’s impossible to remove part of the fabric, or to substitute a swatch, without leaving some trace,” Heller wrote. Typically, blockchains are created by a set of stakeholders working to achieve consensus at every step, so it might be even more apt to picture a knitting collective creating that single scarf together, moving forward only when a majority agrees that a given knot is acceptable.

The idea touted by Votem — along with competitors like Voatz (based in Boston), Smartmatic (London), and Polys (Moscow), each of which also sent teams to Portugal — is that knitting votes into a blockchain would protect them from tampering, whether from government officials, bumbling bureaucrats, or state-based intelligence operations. Unlike bitcoin, a public blockchain powered by thousands of miners around the world, most voting systems, including Votem’s, employ what’s known as a “permissioned ledger,” in which a handful of approved groups (political parties, election observers, government entities) would be allowed to validate the transactions.

Martin looked around the room. “Who’s heard of the Pythagorean theorem?” he asked. “How old is it? Four thousand years old, right? Has it ever changed? No. That’s what the system is built on. The math has to work.”

In 2010, the Board of Elections and Ethics in Washington, D.C., resolved to tackle an issue that has bedeviled officials for decades: some 2.6 million overseas voters, including members of the military, who are largely disenfranchised due to the difficulty of physically visiting a polling place. The usual solution — voting by mail—carries its own risks, such as missing ballots, uncounted votes, and fraud. Nonetheless, every state currently allows snail-mail voting under some circumstances, and three of them (Oregon, Washington, and Colorado) rely exclusively on the method.

Election supervisors in D.C. figured they could do better. They partnered with a nonprofit and developed an online voting system using Ruby on Rails, a web application framework. Then, adopting a practice advocated by cybersecurity specialists, they published their source code, set up a mock election, and issued an open invitation to try hacking it.

Among those who took the challenge were J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor from the University of Michigan perhaps best known for his public call for manual recounts following the 2016 election. Within a day and a half, he and his students had seized control of the platform and obtained the passwords of every voter in the system — along with the ability to change their votes. In an exuberant touch, they even modified the system’s “thank you” page, the one that let voters know they had successfully cast a ballot, to play the Michigan Wolverines’ fight song.