Blockchain for Transparent Voting Systems

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For long, a lot of us have been raising issues and concerning about how elections always goes most especially in the democratic processes. Most times, the democracy system a lot of countries run does not have adequate transparency and integrity when it comes to data collected to help convince the citizens about their voting been transparent and been trustworthy. The innovation of Blockchain technology have come to provide solutions to lot of sectors in the world. Lot of sectors like the education, the academics, the finances and even the politics.

I will like to talk about the political aspect today. Blockchain been Decentralised in nature and been able to help make sure every transaction carried out is transparent and secure have recently be applied even in the voting systems of diverse countries. With the Blockchain technology, we now have a better way elections are being conducted and making elections to be free and fair.

When it comes to the Blockchain technology, it does not necessarily needs any new introduction any longer. Many of us are familiar with it and how it is been used. Blockchain technology been Decentralised in nature which means that it eliminate the hindrances of centralised authority we have always faced, the fact that it is Immutable which means any time transactions are recorded on the Blockchain, it cannot be altered again. Not only that, it is highly secured and transparent, all these features have made it easy for the technology to be used recently in every sphere of our life.

Due to the features that Blockchain Technology has, it helps to offer a whole lot of benefits for the voting system which I will like to talk about. The first is the aspect of transparency and trust. One of the common issues associated with voting system is trust, most especially in my country Nigeria. The fact that the voting datas of citizens can be access and manipulated made it hard for citizens to even trust any voting system. But with the Blockchain technology which has it's own strength in transparency, trust and the Immutability I talked about earlier, it makes it easy to secure every vote that is recorded and even make it difficult to be subjected to any manipulation, fraud or any electoral criminal activities.

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Not only that, the fact that Blockchain technology is really accountability makes it easy for votes that is recorded to be auditable. After the election, the electoral officials can proceed to voting counts and which will even help to eliminate human errors since Blockchain technology is been used for the audits. This also makes it easy for accurate result when it comes to the vote counts and vote result. This all together go a long way to enhance the efficiency of any election. We are now in the digital age, instead of the usual ballots paper, polling stations that we always make use of, it is no longer like that again, we now have Blockchain technology that makes everything automated and not only automated but efficient and reduces cost.

Like many of us know, everything that have advantages will also have disadvantages. In as much as Blockchain technology offers a lot of benefits for the voting system, it still have it's own challenges when it comes to voting system which I will like to talk about. The first is the fact that sometimes it can be hard to understand how the Blockchain technology works most especially if the electoral officials that is operating it is not aware digitally. Not only that, sometimes Blockchain technology cannot handle huge volumes most especially when there is a situation of huge vote counts that might be in hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Even though the Blockchain technology is secured which is very true but it is to an extent. The Blockchain system can be hacked and the vote counts can be manipulated because of that. The vote counts can be inflated by the hackers making it go against the integrity of the voting system. Then the general aspect whereby the Blockchain technology is still under the regulation barrier make it a major hindrances to be adopted by some countries also. There are some countries that have not successfully buy in the idea of making use of Blockchain technology during their election period.

The Blockchain technology has so many potential if you will ask me and we have not even fully see the potential manifesting yet. Many years ago, nobody will have believe that the Blockchain technology can be used even in the voting system but here we are. In the next ten years, we will see the use case of the Blockchain technology more and more.