Blockchain technology as a tool to revolutionize democracy and the voting system

In an ideal world we would be governed by a wise and benevolent monarch, but since humanity has been unable to produce such people and has thus grown out of that potentially autocratic and dictatorial system, we now use democracy instead. However, even with democracy, where every adult has an equal vote in electing their leader, there are still huge potential vulnerabilities in the actual system of voting. Some countries still use paper ballots, which are at risk of security breaches, fraud and corruption.

Even electronic voting is vulnerable to tampering behind the scenes. And this is where blockchain technology can come to the rescue.

Russia’s ruling party – United Russia – has just launched a blockchain-based platform on its website for electronic voting in their upcoming primaries, which even includes a version for mobile phones. Vote counting will now be done via blockchain. Citizens who go through the authorization process on the website will be able to use the e-voting system which should be able to improve election transparency and eliminate intermediates in the electoral process. This is not only a great step forward for democracy but also for fairness and ultimately for blockchain adoption worldwide.

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The distributed ledger technology allows for all votes in such a system to be followed, counted and correlated by several different sources simultaneously, while still maintaining privacy for the voter, thanks to the fact that blockchain can be anonymous and also simultaneously kept as a ledger entry on numerous servers, and so very difficult to tamper with. Security is key in elections and each vote has to be guarded and respected for the democratic process to work. In the case of paper voting, we sometimes see ballot boxes being stuffed with multiple extra voting papers by corrupt parties, or voting ballots being trashed or dumped and not counted. With the blockchain, all the votes will be available for counting in a tamper-proof state.

Admittedly these primary elections about to be held in Russia are a straw vote or opinion poll to decide which politicians in the party to nominate to run for the actual main general election coming up soon. The decisions are not necessarily binding and other members not involved in these primaries can still run in the general election later for the state Duma.

Last month the Moscow City Council submitted a bill to use blockchain technology for e-voting as a means to protect the electoral process and its results. In December last year a region of Southern Russia also conducted a successful blockchain-based election with 40 000 participants to elect members of a local Youth Parliament. Kaspersky Labs have been the main engineers of the voting technology for all these systems so far.

These are small but significant steps in the right direction towards upgrading the democratic voting system as well as the implementing of blockchain technology, which is basically the solution to many of the problems found in banking, elections and general privacy and security in a digital age. Due to being such a new and revolutionary technology, many countries and corporations are adopting a wait-and-see approach. They are reluctant to be the first movers in the space considering they are dealing with such crucial issues like finance and politics, where there is zero room for error. As a result, instead of diving in headlong, they are using initial test-case scenarios to try out the system first.

Russia is not alone in launching such test cases for elections. Thailand has also developed a blockchain system for e-voting this year. They await the rollout of 5G before fully implementing the system. Then voters can vote by email and be verified via mobile camera. The overall improvement in speed, efficiency and cost of elections will inspire many more countries to follow suit in time, once they see working examples around them. In the United States, both West Virginia and Denver, Colorado have launched successful trials of mobile blockchain voting on a limited scale.

And the cities of Zug in Switzerland as well as Tsukuba in Japan have conducted trials too on an official governmental basis.

Blockchain technology is here to stay and many are using it very efficiently since its release to the world by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 as a viable protocol. As with all revolutionary concepts, in the beginning they may laugh at you, then they may fight against you, but eventually the masses will embrace you as they see the obvious benefit. So these initial steps by governments are definitely paving the way to global mass adoption. It’s just a matter of time.