Blockchain voting could soon be a reality in South Korea if the trial on a system based on distributed ledger technology turns out successfully. According to The Korea Times, the development of the blockchain-based voting system will be completed in December. The system which is the brainchild of South Korea’s National Election Commission and the Ministry of Science and ICT is aimed at enhancing...
October 1, 2017. A clandestine referendum election is held against the Spanish government’s orders across schools and polling stations throughout Catalonia. It was a day of defiance with an overwhelming “yes” vote to sever ties with the rest of the mainland. It was also one marked with bloodshed, voter intimidation, and riots. The main perpetrators, then-party leader Carles Puigdemont and ex-vice...
Sierra Leone’s National Electoral Commission (NEC) has denied reports that it used blockchain technology to record votes and verify the integrity of the results in its recent presidential election. In a statement posted on the agency’s Twitter account, the NEC stated in no uncertain terms that its systems utilize “an in-house database to tally election results” and “does not use Blockchain in...
On March 7, 2018 the world's first blockchain-backed presidential vote took place in Sierra Leone. As election suspense heightened, a Swiss blockchain startup, Agora, was working hard behind the scenes to help process and tally the results using blockchain technology. In this particular election, Agora utilized a custom permissioned blockchain technology that it has built over the last two years...
Electronic voting is by no means new. In one way or another, non-paper-ballot voting has been going on for decades. It should surprise no one that there have been instances of severe security breaches in more than one jurisdiction. The HBO documentary “Hacking Democracy” covers this in detail. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts know there is a good solution to the problem of compromised electronic voting...
Calling electronic voting “inevitable,” a new paper by Philip Bucher for the European Parliament speculates on the possibility of Bitcoin’s revolutionary blockchain technology to bring transparency, efficiency, and greater fairness to elections in its various member democracies. The paper first notes that because electronic voting is in its infancy, there are still many unknowns, but then jumps...
How can a voting platform that touts transparency also be secure? That's the question posed by Jackie Burns Koven, a Research Assistant of Technology and Public Policy at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs in her published piece by Forbes.
Bitcoin ATM-developer and blockchain-tech firm Blockchain Technologies Corp (BTC) has revealed that it is developing a tamper-resistant voting machine dubbed “VoteWatcher.”