With the Malaysian electoral process preparing to ramp up to full speed tomorrow, Finterra argues that Blockchain technology, which is already widely used in finance, real estate, healthcare and other sectors — not only offers the most secure voting technology available, but could potentially revolutionise the entire voting process, bringing innovation to an outdated system and, more importantly, improve election security across the board, reducing skepticism of the democratic process across the globe.

 

Voting Security Advantages on the Blockchain

Every record on a blockchain appears on a peer-to-peer, distributed ledger, meaning that everyone on the network can view and verify records. For election purposes, each vote would connect to an individual voter, and any discrepancies would be solved by simply reviewing the ledger — reducing voter fraud. Further, voters’ identities would be completely anonymous.

Though individual votes would be publicly available, voters would be masked behind an encrypted key of random numbers and letters. This would ensure privacy and security — much more than traditional ballot boxes — and reduce the possibility of voter suppression: if you can’t identify voters, you can’t target them.

A blockchain is also immutable: that is, every record on the ledger is permanent and unalterable. That would make auditing easier, tampering almost impossible and lost or missing votes a thing of the past. Every ballot would be final and guaranteed.

But perhaps the important security advantage of the blockchain is decentralisation. Because the ledger is distributed across a public network, it has no single storage base. In order for the voting network to be compromised, you would need to hack a majority of the “blocks” and complete the hack before new blocks are created, like an extremely complex game of whack-a-mole. This makes hacking any blockchain hard. For a large blockchain — such as an election blockchain — it would be even harder.

 

Next Steps

Critics of blockchain-based voting largely miss the point. While the blockchain may be imperfect, its weaknesses are dwarfed by those of the current system. Furthermore, blockchain technology would solve the two most prominent election concerns (which generally fall along ideological lines): voter access and voter fraud.

For activists worried about voter suppression, a blockchain-based solution would allow eligible voters to cast ballots anonymously on their laptops, tablets or smartphones, using an encrypted key. At the same time, the public ledger would tie each ballot to an individual voter, establishing a permanent and immutable record. Fraud would be highly unlikely, and any foul play would either be evident on the ledger or corrected by the peer-to-peer consensus network.

In that regard, blockchain-based voting represents a bipartisan win-win proposition. The trick lies in persuasion and adoption, as with any major technological innovation.

 

 

With Finterra in the final stages of building its own proprietary blockchain platform, Finterra enables real world solutions that address the needs of governments and global industries.

Finterra offers a truly global, fully inclusive platform that aims to bridge the gap between consumers, providers and regulators through its innovative blockchain platform.


Source
http://www.finterra.org/2018/05/08/can-blockchain-technology-solve-voting-issues/