Digitally Transforming the Election Process

Carriages turned into smart cars, books into e-books, landlines into smartphones and paper money into cryptocurrency. Almost everything around us has advanced technologically, as people keep finding new ways to improve their quality of life. A few things, though, have stayed stuck in their old ways. Voting is one of them. Why go through the complicated and, frankly, tiresome process of traditional voting when e-voting is a very real option today?

Traditional voting vs. e-voting

Voting is the act of choosing someone or something in an election. Traditional voting relies on paper, pens and a great many people to make sure the election runs smoothly. E-voting removes all of that and lets you vote from anywhere, on your device of choice, with a working internet connection.

E-voting also brings new threats, which is why many countries and organizations approach it with caution, and reasonably so. Voting must be safe, legitimate and accurate, and an e-voting system on its own can be manipulated. That changes when it runs on a platform that offers end-to-end verification and much more. That is where blockchain comes in.

What is blockchain?

In its most basic form, a blockchain is a digital ledger. It uses peers, or nodes, across its network to verify, process and record every transaction in the system. Supported by many nodes at once, the ledger is not stored in one place; it exists on the chain itself. Encryption and decentralization make the record extremely hard to corrupt, and every entry is easy to verify. No single party can take the network down or influence it, because it doesn't exist in one place.

Blockchain doesn't only carry financial transactions; it can carry any type of data. That makes it a strong fit for e-voting.

Blockchain and e-voting

One of the main concerns about e-voting is security: a hacker could breach an online voting system and tamper with the results. A blockchain-based voting application is far more resilient, because even if an attacker got through one node, they could not change the others. A vote on a blockchain is an encrypted piece of data stored across a network rather than on a single server.

Voters could also cast their ballots without their identity or political preference being revealed. And since each ID can be attributed to only one vote, officials can count votes with great certainty.

A blockchain voting system is decentralized and open, yet it protects voters. Anyone could count the votes without knowing who voted for whom.

Very few countries and organizations use this technology for voting yet, because it is still a new and unfamiliar concept. But many great ideas were once unfamiliar, and sometimes frightening. Before 1903, people must have thought the airplane a terrifying machine. Where would the world be today if no one had taken a risk on it? E-voting through blockchain may bring great things with it. It is time for voting to move past its old ways.