Horizen and Guatemala Work Together

Peter Stewart, an accomplished software developer and Horizen volunteer team member dedicated hundreds of hours to creating a process and website to assist in the documentation of the August 2019 Guatemalan election results. Horizen co-founder Rolf Versluis worked closely with Carlos Toriello of Fiscal Digital to provide testing and feedback to Peter on the application.

What made his contribution unique was the new application provided a process where anyone could take a digital picture, create a unique fingerprint of it using is SHA-256 hash function, then store it on the powerful and secure Horizen public blockchain.

The citizens of Guatemala have had little visibility in the election process in this past. This crucial development allows them to have visibility and access to immutable documentation of their elections. The election process in Guatemala is very democratic, with each district tallying votes and recording them on paper ballots that are forwarded to the capital for counting. In order to expedite the election process, there is a manual computer entry of each ballot on the day of the election. Unfortunately, there is no public visibility into the electronic version of the tally and the system could be manipulated with little oversight.