The QFS Blockchain Conspiracy

Steve Pieczenik, a former State Department official turned novelist, is the source of a conspiracy theory called the QFS Blockchain, claiming Trump's team stamped a hidden watermark on the 2020 ballots.

The theory claims a Trump administration sting put an invisible watermark on ballots or envelopes, tied to voter registration data, to distinguish real votes from ones fraudulently inserted for Biden.

Legitimate American mail in voting starts with registering your address, birth date, and party with your state, which then mails a ballot covering federal, state, and local races to your home.

You sign the return envelope, mail the completed ballot, and it travels to a counting facility where officials compare your signature against the state's registration record.

Counting itself is watched by partisan observers using offline machines and bipartisan counters, before the results are tabulated and a winner certified.

The conspiracy theory alleges that hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots were inserted somewhere in that chain to flip the tally toward Biden.

Its mechanism is an invisible watermark tied to registration data, framed as a cryptographic commitment that is auditable, time stamped, and immutable, meant to separate real ballots from inserted ones.

His first rebuttal is that ballot counting is already a massively decentralized process watched by partisan observers, so it is garbage in, garbage out: the scheme only matters if the input data was already compromised.

Pulling it off would require both a compromised voter registration database and a supply of counterfeit ballots slipped into the mail stream, since ballots are fungible and a mail carrier delivering extra look alike ballots would raise no flags if the signatures matched.

Ballots are printed by a small set of private companies rather than the states or federal government, so secretly watermarking them would require accessing every state's voter registration database after printing.

The scheme would have to run in total secrecy across roughly 12 states and as many as 100 million ballots, with everyone involved in printing and watermarking staying silent.

Proponents would also need evidence solid enough to be admissible in court proving the system was airtight, yet no one has ever explained how or by whom the fraudulent ballots were actually produced.

A conspiracy at this scale would require active complicity from the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the intelligence community, secretly allowing known fraud to happen just to prosecute it later, with conspirators traceable back to the Biden campaign.

A second part of the theory claims the National Guard was deployed with arrests imminent, which makes little sense since posse comitatus normally bars the military from domestic law enforcement, making the story look more like an alleged coup.

His verdict is that the sting is not credible, though American elections can genuinely be improved, and he remains a strong proponent of e-voting when the cryptography is solid.

Real, mundane flaws do exist, like mail in ballots sent to addresses people no longer live at, and local fraud happens on both sides of the aisle but tends to balance out statistically across 150 million voters.

The genuine danger is not small bipartisan local fraud but a sophisticated foreign adversary gaining god mode control to arbitrarily change outcomes, and audit and recount mechanisms exist specifically to catch discrepancies like more recorded voters than registrations.

He dismisses Steve Pieczenik as someone who went from psychiatry to writing Tom Clancy style fiction and now peddles four dimensional chess framing instead of the mundane truth that no president has ever been reelected during a depression level economy with 200,000 pandemic deaths.

Trump actually outperformed his 2016 numbers, but even more people turned out for Biden after four years of intense media polarization, and conspiracy theorists never explain who introduced the fraud or why Trump's own appointees, Attorney General Bill Barr, the CIA director, and the NSA director, could not detect it.

The Department of Homeland Security partnered with the election security nonprofit VotingWorks back in 2019, and many federal and intelligence agencies already audit the country's deliberately decentralized voting infrastructure, though the tradeoff is a system that is slow and lets local glitches, like a database mistakenly mailing a ballot to a deceased voter, slip through.

He argues introducing hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots undetected at national scale is implausible, since if it were that easy, China, Russia, or a corporation would already be doing it.

Even granting the capability, the Trump White House had no message discipline for four years, leaking even to Bob Woodward's book, so a secret nationwide watermarking program would never have stayed hidden or survived a Supreme Court challenge.

For Trump supporting crypto people specifically, the reality is that Biden won, and it is tempting but wrong to get seduced by a comforting conspiracy theory instead of accepting a divided government and a broader domestic and global great reset of expectations.

Biden did not win by a landslide and Democrats actually lost House seats, so Charles predicts a 2022 red wave similar to the 1994 Gingrich wave, possibly setting up another contentious decision in 2024.

He points to his own work building e-voting systems on published academic, cryptographic, and information security analysis, predicting that within four years the 2024 US presidential election could run on a blockchain backend, fully online or in hybrid form with a paper component.

He sees party primaries as the practical first adoption point for cheaper, more frequent elections, but admits that no matter the facts, millions of Americans will keep believing QFS or mass ballot fraud, treating unsupported on air claims as proof.

He draws a direct parallel to 2016, when Democrats invented the Russia collusion theory rather than accept Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump, and three years of the Mueller investigation never proved a single vote flipped from Clinton to Trump.

Russia's actual 2016 role was running Facebook ads and spreading misinformation, yet the US itself is the world's top spreader of election misinformation, followed by China, and 2016 is the case where meddling narratives went parabolic because Democrats could not accept losing, a temptation the right now faces too.

As the 45th president, Trump faces the same test every predecessor has faced: honor the peaceful transition of power, or have the very institutions he appointed turn against him once his power fades.

He predicts the lawsuits and recounts will go nowhere and Trump will become the 45th president succeeded by the 46th, Joe Biden, while flagging Biden's age of 78 and apparent frailty in a recent eight minute speech.

His closing verdict is that there was no sting operation, no National Guard arrests, and nothing foundationally broken in the American voting system, just bureaucracy and inefficiency, which he expects will drive an e-voting renaissance.

Local fraud does happen, like someone forging a deceased or absent neighbor's ballot, but at over 100 million voters it is a small unavoidable margin of error, similar to the 2000 Bush v Gore butterfly ballot that led confused Florida voters to accidentally cast their vote for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore.

His closing take is that the 2020 outcome satisfied neither side, so both parties should get back to work together, and history will not be kind to baseless conspiracy theories, so stay skeptical and think for yourself.