Guilherme Schneider's blog

A Blockchain voting system would have avoided the mess on the 2020 US elections

January 24, 2021
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The US citizens and the entire world watched the literal mess of the votes counting that happened during the days after the actual election day. The mess did not stop even after Mr. Biden has been declared President-elect. President Trump and some Republican Senators started with the election fraud narrative and even legal challenges had been filed over. What could have helped avoid all this mess? A voting system created using the blockchain. Why? Let´s start by recalling what is the blockchain.

As per Euromoney Learning definition:

Blockchain is a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system. A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain. Each block in the chain contains a number of transactions, and every time a new transaction occurs on the blockchain, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s ledger. The decentralised database managed by multiple participants is known as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Blockchain is a type of DLT in which transactions are recorded with an immutable cryptographic signature called a hash .

Reading the definition of blockchain itself you are probably already understanding my point in question here, if the US (and other countries around the world) have adopted or do adopt in the future the blockchain as the platform for their voting system, no politician (or anyone else) will be able to challenge the reliability of the casted votes or of the counting: the records in a blockchain are immutable.

Some countries like Estonia and Brazil already have adopted electronic voting systems and moving these systems to the blockchain would be an additional step on increasing the security and reliability of these systems. Japan already introducing blockchain voting initiatives.

The excuses of some politicians and groups that a digital system would avoid the access to elections to the "disenfranchised" is completely bollocks, today almost every citizen in the Western economies do have access to internet, mobile phones with internet and so on. If Facebook, Twitter, Instagram at al can have billions of using accessing their platforms, it is more than logical that any kind of electronic / online voting system would be easy to access from these countries.

For those without the access "from the comfort of their sofas", the Governments can setup the traditional structures for the citizens to cast their votes, but I argue that any online / digital system will be hundreds of times more secure and reliable than the current "mail voting" that we saw in the USA and are also very common in the UK elections.

The events of the last days in the US has shown us that we do need citizens to trust on their electoral system, this is a fundamental pillar of the democracies and, therefore, the adoption of new technologies which enable citizens to be sure about the transparency and reliability of their elections is paramount.

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