Voting on the Blockchain

According to recent reports coming from Virginia, the state will be using the Blockchain voting system for the presidential elections in 2020. The state’s election director, Donald Kersey reported that the operation will pick up from where it left off on a pilot system back in mid-2018. The state is however , the only U.S. state to have officially used the Blockchain technology for voting.

This voting system will first be introduced and aimed at overseas and military voters, notorious for low annual turnouts. Only 7 percent of overseas voters turned out for the 2016 presidential elections according to the Federal Voting Assistance program. Comparatively, Americans nationwide had a turn out rate of over 72 percent.

The possibility of being able to vote via a smartphone was thought to be a difficult task a few years ago before the introduction of “Decentralisation”. This is expected to make the voting process less laborious, quick, simple and easy to execute w ithout the possibility of compromising integrity.

In the pilot phase, the office of the West Virginian Secretary of State worked with a platform provided by Voatz, a startup for the development of Blockchain voting.

A test was done by allowing voters to download the Voatz app on their smartphones, while verifying their identity and selecting their country. The test was a complete success which led Voatz to retain the contract for 2020.

There were reportedly more than 340 overseas voters who attempted to vote on the Blockchain system back in 2018. However, most of the people who tried using the Blockchain for voting quickly found out that their country of residence did not allow this to happen.

The internet is heading for Governance

Some criticism was drawn from this test particularly concerning questions about the role played by Voatz with questions regarding the possibility of Voatz being hacked and whether the app could see who voted.

Some also asked whether smartphones could be stolen or hacked and used to execute unauthorised voting by intruders.

A good understanding of Blockchain 3.0 Governance system shows that these nodes of the Blockchain are not run by the Voatz company. It is also not reliant on regular computers that are owned by any members of the public. Instead, the test is done by 32 servers which belonged to cloud infrastructure giants like AWS and Microsoft’s Azure.

According to comments coming from Donald Kersey:

“We are not saying that blockchain technology is the best solution to storage of secure data. But what we are saying though is that it’s better than what we currently have.”

Anonymity is one of the prime features of voting and this is one of the strong points of blockchain implementation as the votes are divorced from the caster as soon as it enters the Blockchain data structure. While providing voters with records of their votes and can still be anonymously copied to any email or document format with their ballot attached to it.

Share the news on;

8











8 Shares