By As per recent reports coming from West Virginia, the state is said to be considering using a blockchain voting system for the upcoming presidential elections in 2020.
Donald Kersey, the state’s election director reported that the operation will pick up from where it left off back in mid 2018. However, it must be noted that the state is the U.S. state to have officially made use of blockchain technology for voting.
This groundbreaking voting system will first be introduced and aimed at citizens living abroad as well as those serving in the military as these demographics make for low voting turnouts. Currently, only 7% of overseas voters made to it to the polls during the 2016 presidential elections as per data from the Federal Voting Assistance program. In comparison to this, U.S. citizens nationwide had a decent turn out rate of around 72%.
The possibility of casting a vote via a smartphone was something that was pretty much unheard of a few years ago before the world was introduced to “Decentralisation”. The introduction of a blockchain-based system could make the process of voting less laborious, quick, simple and easy without any possibility of compromising integrity.
During the pilot phase back in 2016, the office of West Virginian Secretary of State worked with a platform which was developed by Voatz, a startup devoted to the development of blockchain voting.
A test was conducted which allowed users to download the Voatz app on their smartphones, while verifying their identity and selecting their country of residence. The test was an undeniable success and meant Voatz retained their contract for the upcoming elections in 2020.
There were apparently as many as 340 overseas voters who tried to make use of the blockchain system in 2016, but many found issues trying to use the app for voting due to the country of residence not allowing it to happen.
Blockchain Governance.
Much criticism was garnered from the test phase in particular surrounding questions about the role played by Voatz with many questioning the possibility of Voatz suffering a hack and whether the app could see who voted.
Others questions whether smartphones could be stolen or hacked in order to commit unauthorised voting by malicious individuals.
A solid understanding of the Blockchain 3.0 Governance systems shows that these nodes on the blockchain are not run by Voatz. The platform is not reliant on regular computing systems which owned by members of the public. Instead the test is carried out by 32 servers which belong to cloud infrastructure companies such as AWS or Microsoft’s Azure.
Donald Kersey added to this:
“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 the core features of voting and this is a shared aspect and a strong point found within the implementation of blockchain. Votes leave the caster as soon as it enters the blockchain data structure. Voters can still receive records of their votes and can be a anonymously copied to any email or document format with their ballot attached to it.
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