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As the longest election season in US history draws to a close, there are already calls to take it into overtime. Donald Trump has made multiple vague claims that the elections are rigged and has declared that he will contest the results… if he loses. One can assume that rigging in his favor would be quite acceptable. Meanwhile, Sanders supporters are incensed about Wikileaks reports of everything from early access to debate questions to planted stories that indicate that the DNC had thrown in for Clinton from the very beginning (For what it’s worth, they have admitted as much in court). Some of us are hoping that Obama will fulfill Republicans dictator prophecy and allow the US to retain him on a month-to-month contract while we sort things out.

A few among the elite have raised an even scarier issue. Tampering with the machines themselves. Usually, this is used as a club to beat the war drums against Russia; claiming an imminent cyber attack targeting our elections. But is there any truth to it? Are the voting machines used in a majority of US elections vulnerable to attack?

The answer, sadly, is yes.

Vote flipping, or changing the votes before or during counting can happen in a number of ways in our current system. A remote cyber attack is unlikely, but if one were able to get close enough to a machine, he could, in fact, alter the count by adding multipliers to one or more candidates or just reversing the results. Even worse, in some cases the votes are tallied off site in a remote location controlled by a private company. When either of these things happens, there’s no way to trace it electronically. The only way to be sure that the vote is pure is to compare it with manual exit polls. Luckily, we’ve decided to stop doing exit polls.

Ah… Democracy.

Well, it’s been proven that the US is an oligarchy a number of times. No need for surprise here. However, it’d be interesting to see how the oligarchs vote. Democracy is too good for us plebs, but surely they have something worked out to make sure that they have fair representation, right?

Well, while oligarchs don’t believe in one man, one vote they do have their own voting system. Shareholders vote on a regular basis to determine the fate of true powers in the world: corporations. The process is a little different than what we’re used to. Voting is based on shares, so not everyone’s voice carries the same weight. In addition, ballots are still handled mostly by hand. But they still have a similar middleman issue.

In those cases where you want to exercise power over a corporation but you don’t want anyone to know you’re doing it, you need to become what’s called a “Beneficial Holder.” These shadowy figures hold their shares through a number of middlemen whose job it is to make them impossible to find. Even the companies they own don’t know who there are. As you might imagine, this complicates things when it comes time to vote.

You see, most of these arrangements are handled through a company called Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc. This company gained a near monopoly on stockholder obfuscation shortly after the stock exchange industry began to blow up and paper balloting became more inconvenient. By offering an efficient solution, they were able to corner the market. Capitalism at its best.

But like any monopoly, Broadridge become corrupt. Recently there have been reports of votes not turning out the way they should have. The oligarchs were being disenfranchised; their will subverted by uncaring tyrants. Karma you might say. Unlike the rest of us, though, they aren’t willing to just sit back and take it. They want change and they seem to have decided on a way to do it.

At the latest Council of Institutional Investors meeting in Delaware, Judge Travis Laster put out the call for revolution. “I want you, the institutional stockholders of America, to take back the voting and stockholding infrastructure of the U.S. securities markets.” In his speech to the body, he took the existing system to task. He claims that proposals sponsored by management are “overwhelmingly more likely to win . . . by a very small amount than to lose by a very small amount—to a degree that cannot occur by chance.” He punctuated this riveting speech with a cry of “Freedom!” before raising his gavel in anger and charging off to defeat the English.

In all seriousness, Judge Laster would be in a good position to know about these things. As a judge in Delaware, corporate capital of the world, he regularly presides over cases where these issues occur. And, as should be expected of a judge, be backed up his arguments with studies as well as personal experience. He also had a solution.

This answer, of course, is the blockchain. For the unschooled, the blockchain is the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Etherium. This technology allows a collective of computers to act as a single distributed ledger; keeping track of transactions, account balances, and potentially votes. By replacing the current proxy voting system controlled by Broadridge, with a distributed system controlled by the voters own machines, there would no longer be a middleman to corrupt the process. To quote the judge, “You can take the lead on distributed ledger technology, or you can let the intermediaries replace one intervening institution with another.”

Does this mean blockchain technology can play a bigger role in other decision-making processes? Maybe. But this does come with some risks. Blockchain tech is highly dependent on capital. The more processing power you can muster, the more control you’ll potentially have. In fact, if you manage to gain a majority of the computing power of the collective, you can override the decisions of the whole. This has already begun to affect smaller blockchains such as those based on Etherium and has caused instability in those markets. Before we start allowing the tech to determine those course of money on a larger scale or indeed the fate of nations crucial work needs to be done. At the very least, we must ensure that the process can’t be corrupted by brute force tactics. But if we can navigate these dangers, it represents a great opportunity to remove yet another middleman from the world.