Blockchain application in elections

Democracy in most nations is exercised through universal suffrage, people participate in the election process to vote their leaders through an electoral process. Most electoral processes are done manually with few having a complementary electronic system for transmitting votes count and the final result.

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Electro process has been mauled with malpractices ranging from voter bribery, voter suppressing, rigging, and systems hacking. Another big challenge during the elections are the big queues that people have to keep on wait to cast their ballots, this challenge discourages most from turning out to vote.

Disputed elections and post-election violence are also very frequent especially in most African countries where the electoral process are questionable. Cases of missing ballot boxes after an election, use of violence to instill fear among voters that are not likely to vote a particular candidate, pre-marking of ballot boxes before the election-day, hacking and manipulation of electoral systems are some of the ills in the electoral process.

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These challenges have been in existence and efforts to do away with t through use of technology which is inevitable. One of the ways that most stakeholders are looking at is the application of blockchain technology.

Blockchain is a distributed public ledger that keeps copies of data across multiple locations. The technology has been applied in finance in cryptocurrencies where cryptos such as Bitcoin is used as internet money that can be used to settle a transition serving as a medium of exchange.

The current system is manual where voters are given ballots to ark their preferred candidates then cast the ballot in a ballot box. Later after time for voting comes to an end counting is done and the vote count transmitted to a national center where they are aggregated with those from other places to determine the winner. This system is inherently susceptible to manipulation from the point of ballot marking, alteration of the transmission results and loss of casted ballots.

Blockchain features that make this technology very efficient are immutability, data on the network can hardly be changed for the case of an election changing casted votes is difficult. Records on the blockchain appear on a peer-to-peer and everybody on the network can view and verify the records.  In an election case each vote converts to an individual voter and if there are discrepancies they can be solved by reviewing the ledger.

Using this technology voters are anonymous usually masked by encryption to ensure privacy, this can reduce cases of voter suppression in the conventional manual voting process. Blockchain is immutable and can hardly be changed, tampering with the votes cast becomes a thing of the past where there are cases of missing ballots. Blockchain is decentralized and a single point for hacking is impossible for hackers to succeed, they have to hack majority f the blocks and complete new blocks before new ones are created which is also hard since the process requires massive computation.

Blockchain system can be set to only allow eligible voters cast ballots anonymously from devices such as mobile phones using an encrypted key, the public edger ties each ballot to an individual voter establishing an immutable record.

Already there are countries that have already implemented the process, these are Estonia, a leader in digitalization of processes such as their eResidency where you can apply to be a resident of Estonia even without being thee physically, Iceland and Denmark. There are also companies that are working on projects that address the application of blockchain in elections, Follow My Vote is developing an open source blockchain platform to increase election security and transparency

Though no technology would be a hundred percent perfect blockchain would address areas where other technologies applied failed. There need to be more research into this application and all stakeholders engaged.

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