The Blockchain-Enabled Elections Of The Future
- We now have the technology to immutably store and process data in a trustless environment, yet we still resort to paper ballots as the fundamental ingredient for elections.
- In a blockchain-enabled future, voting will be as simple as withdrawing money from an ATM, and processing election results will be finished in minutes.
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Imagine going into the voting booth and being greeted by a machine, not much dissimilar from a touch screen-enabled ATM. You click a large Start button and you enter your social security number, or whatever unique identifier is issued to you by the country you live in.
On the next step, you are greeted by the images of all candidates that participate in the current election campaign. You select your choice and click a large Confirm button. In the final step, you are asked to confirm your choice. A full screen image of your choice is presented with a simple question: “Are you sure you want to vote for [name]?”. You then click Confirm & Vote. You are done.
In an instant, your vote is recorded on a permissioned blockchain. Due to loss of data concerns, local permissioned blockchains will be created for each voting area. When all votes are collected and voting is closed, local data could be fed to another permissioned blockchain that operates at the country level.
Running a few simple math operations on the data provided by the central permissioned blockchain is all any country would need to announce the results of an election.
Instead of waiting for hours upon hours, and in some cases, days, a blockchain-based voting system will ensure the prompt processing of voting data, along with immutability, security and storage.
Compared to the election process that is widely used nowadays, the blockchain-enabled election process of the future paints a better picture, one that values voters’ personal time. In a digital age, we are still resorting to paper to handle one of the most fundamental processes of democracy. It is slow, financially ineffective, and most of all, outdated.
- The proposal noted that burning UST will “reduce the outstanding bad debt of the Terra economy”, and could help restore UST’s dollar peg.
- Submitted on 20 May, and suggesting the burning of roughly 11% of UST’s total supply, the proposal received 99.3% of the total cast votes in favor of it.
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- The scheme promised “evidence that completely discredits mr trump” if people sent enough cryptocurrency to a designated Monero address.
- Another Monero address was available where people who didn’t want the “evidence” to be released could send cryptocurrency.
- The USPS has proposed a number of different frameworks and concepts around its central idea of blockchain-based voting.
- The news follows recent comments from President Donald J. Trump concerning the funding of the mail service.