Brazil Thinking of Using Ethereum Blockchain for Laws and Petitions

The Ethereum blockchain is extremely powerful and the adoption rate has grown exponentially, as many cryptocurrencies and companies now rely on it. It has numerous real-world applications, and its most popular feature is smart contracts. Smart contracts are contracts that are executed, enforced and managed digitally, using computer power. The blockchain is a secure way of sending data and making transactions from peer to peer in a decentralized fashion. The blockchain technology has been revolutionizing many industries since its creation, and it keeps changing the way we interact as users and contributors to platforms that rely on it.

Brazil’s political and electoral system revolves around the use of petitions, which is a useful way of making changes and asking for people’s opinion. However, with a population of more than 200 million people, with around 145 million eligible voters, this petition system has been problematic in many ways. The first issue is that signatures are gathered manually and then transported into trucks. This makes it very complicated to reach every voter and is very costly and tedious. In the Brazilian constitution, it is written that petitions need to receive 1% of the population’s signatures in order to be considered and discussed by Congress. This is why many petitions fail, as the system does not allow for everyone to participate, in addition to signatures being lost or left uncounted. Another issue with the current system is that there are numerous security flaws. Because of low protection and because signatures are manually collected on paper, this often results in votes being modified by third-parties, and thus rendered illegitimate. This is one of the biggest problems Brazil is facing: the authenticity of signatures.

Two Brazilian legislators are hoping to change the petition system and to solve the issues that the country has been experiencing, using the powerful ethereum network and blockchain. Ricardo Fernandes Paixão, a congress legislative advisor and Everton Fraga, an ethereum blockchain enthusiast and programmer, want to bring change to the electoral system. By using the blockchain for petitions, many of those issues can be erased. Brazilians will have an application, that is currently being developed by Congress, where they will be able to cast their votes easily and securely. Each signature will turn into a transaction sent through the ethereum network. The signature therefore becomes encrypted and will be directly collected by Congress. Security is reinforced as each transaction (or signature) is associated with the voter’s information, using a hashing process. Therefore, the system cannot be breached and the signatures can’t be modified.

Brazil will be one of the first countries to adopt the blockchain technology to change the voting system. It is a promising endeavor, and it will be very interesting to see how this project develops and how it can truly modify the situation in the world’s fifth largest country. Other nations could be inspired by Brazil and adopt the blockchain technology in the future.

TLDR: Brazil wants to use the ethereum blockchain to solve their electoral system issues. This will allow for Brazilians to sign petitions in a secure, immutable, transparent and easy way.

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