Thailand has become the first ever country to use blockchain for voting in its elections. Thailand’s Democrat Party used ZCoin blockchain for the live voting. The elections were held between 1st and 9th November 2018, where the country’s citizens could vote for their representatives using blockchain technology.

During the elections, the citizens were provided with two ways to vote. The first system was through voting stations equipped with a Raspberry Pi system, while the second gave users the option to submit their photo ID as proof for registering into a blockchain based voting application known as “D-Elect”. The application enabled citizens to vote in a decentralized way. Afterward, the information was stored in blocks to provide a tamper-free and secure environment.

These blocks also known as IPFS, have the capacity to support huge amounts of data, curbing the need to store data in pen-paper based methods as in earlier systems. Later, these IPFS hashes were then recorded into the ZCoin blockchain. To secure this information, multiple keys were shared among five custodians representing each candidate in the election. These keys were needed to decrypt the voting system as per the Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme.

Speaking on this matter, Poramin Insom, Founder and Lead Developer of ZCoin, stated that the blockchain based live voting system had resulted in a great success with the number of participants at 1,27,479 in the first year of implementation of the app. He also said that D-Elect was the first ever blockchain based voting app in the whole world and aims to serve as a motivation for other countries as well to adopt a similar system.