21st Century Democracy To Run on Blockchain Technology?

Horizon State is a startup utilizing blockchain technology to build a ballot box, which can’t be hacked or tampered. The distributed nature of the blockchain also makes it trustless and secure. One of the interesting features it offers is option to have non-binary votes.

Our current system allows us to vote for just one candidate – Horizon State can support weighted votes amongst different candidates. This can prevent non-favorable candidates from having a chance to win elections, as voters would have a chance to distribute their vote amongst the good candidates.

By providing both security and transparency – reducing the risk of foul play and enabling everyone to audit the results, blockchain solutions could reshape the future of elections.

“Blockchain is already driving a tremendous amount of investment and innovation across a wide range of industries, starting with financial services. The government could be next”, noted RJ Krawiec on TechCrunch, who correctly predicted blockchain startups serving governments would soon pop up.

A Blockchain democracy can deal can easily make decisions like whether a new bullet train should be imported in city or a new dam should be built with the help of constituency voting for it. This would also lead to inclusive governance where the citizens would regularly feel that their opinion matters and is actually being used by the government.

There are many incentives for using such systems – they can be cost effective since voting in a blockchain based democracy would cost magnitudes of time less than what it currently costs to hold elections while being more secure and robust. As an example, HST claims that the cost per vote would always be less than $0.5 whereas currently Federal elections cost government upwards for $10 per vote.