Bitcoin Forum

In my country, elections are held with an electronic ballot box. Many people question the effectiveness and real security of this method, which although it seems promising, brings some insecurities, as no electronic system is proof of fraud or failure.

Could blockchain technology solve this problem definitively?

Would it be a good thing to apply this technology in elections and put people's future in the hands of blockchain?

I personally believe more in the security of the blockchain than a ballot box made using technology that is subject to alteration and fraud, controlled by the government itself.

Elections are a centralised process that is controlled by the government. So for an election, you should have all the data on the blockchain voting system. We know all the data would be public if it weren't encrypted, which isn't a good idea at all. I am not a developer and don't have much idea about coding. But for the voting system, there should be a transparent process. I don't believe blockchain would help with such things as a centralised voting process. Blockchain seems to be more interesting in the financial and technological sectors.

The use of blockchain in elections implies at least some integrity in the voting results. Why do officials need integrity in voting? Show me one country where there is honest voting. There is no such country. Officials in any country are not interested in fair elections, so blockchain is unlikely to be used in such events. At least not in the near future.

I'm not also grounded in coding but I have a strong feeling that blockchain technology could be of help but it will involve some kind of complex processes. The uniqueness of blockchain is in the integrity or data, making the election process decentralized where each citizen is assigned a unique identifier and access to cast a vote that is distributed and choice made available for public views even when the identifier is kept anonymous, this could actually lead to some sort of transparent election process. The challenge is if countries will have the political will to pursue this? Will the elites allow power to truly shift to the hands of the citizens?
Your guess is as good as mine.

Like I said, I'm still a novice as far as coding is concerned but I feel there is a possibility in deploying blockchain technology in electioneering process.

On one hand, adding the voting system to the blockchain seems like a good idea because it's often seen as an open and decentralized system recording transactions publicly. On the other hand, there's concern that it could lead to congestion, similar to past issues with the ordinals. Elections, despite advancements like electronic voting, still face manipulation. Each vote added to a block requires validation by miners, which could be challenging for individual political candidates who might not want to pay fees just to cast their votes. Governments may be hesitant to adopt this due to blockchain's secure nature, and if they may want to rig the elections, they might not be willing to wait for potential changes that could be controlled by developers, risking delays in their election processes.

Adds credibility to the lie :) , like calling the dead back to life to vote.

I don't think it's necessary, because no matter how sophisticated the technology is, it's still used by humans, and designing it for elections, I'm not sure how honest it is, but don't forget things that can be deceitful on the outside in it. Don't just talk about the good things about it but be honest with the things that exist. Transparency does not come from technological solutions, but instead enhances the ethics of leaders and citizens.

Government will not allow the use Blockchain in their countries electronic transmission of elections results because of their minds of manipulating the election results. And this has come clear in my country last year election. The Electoral Body promised to transmit the results online but when the time comes, it was manually transmitted and the opposition parties against it because there would re-write the results manually so it caused a big issue. And after the election, there was a conference held by the opposition parties and one of the presenters said, election results can be transmitted through Blockchain. And it would be more saver than any means. But I know politicians will not allow it because they can't manipulate it election again. But if really Blockchain is used in election, it will change the narrative of elections manipulation.

Blockchain is not some magical think that makes everything related to data more secure and decentralized. It's an append-only database with blocks of transactions. And you don't need that for voting. Voting needs a good digital identity system, so that votes could not be faked. How you store and count votes is a secondary problem that is much easier to solve.

The solution blockchain offers are limitless but blockchain will not be adopted for certain purposes in corrupt societies or parastatals because it will render their corrupt practices useless and limit the possibility of further perpetrations of corruption.

Elections are been marred with heavy rigging and disenfranchisement and this is not a possibility using the blockchain technology. So, blockchain remains a solution to global practices.

Speaking of election. For me, if we use Blockchain, yes, there is an improvement or somehow solving the problem but not totally, because these corrupt governments will still find a way to cheat and manipulate, especially vote buying which here in our country, vote buying is really popular every election, and flying voters where you can vote multiple times by using other's identity.

Not necessarily as not all blockchains are decentralized and public. The government, particularly the department that handles the elections, could indeed make use of the blockchain technology in an election, but does it automatically mean that the process would now become honest and fair? I don't think so. It may happen that such a blockchain only gives permission to certain government personalities or officials to change or remove certain data therein.

With the transparency and public of blockchain, this will really be a big change for elections if applied and that is what people want. But the problem is that politicians don't want this and politics is the darkest thing in this world, they never want things to be transparent or public so they will never let that happen.

Just like bitcoin is a currency that is superior to fiat money in many aspects, but governments and politicians always seek to ban it because they know that it will benefit the people but will threaten the their power. They never let bitcoin become the world's currency.

They could use bitcoin to secure a provable election but right now the fees would be too high, they could use the underlying technology through Syscoin which is secured by bitcoin's hashrate and has low fees.

Elections have bigger problems that need to be solved first. But provably fair elections would be great.

blockchain can solve problems related to elections where every vote will be directly recorded in the blockchain ledger and then it cannot be manipulated by any party. but that is in theory, in practice people will still doubt this technology because there are several parties who have access to a back door that can manipulate the vote counting results.

moreover, politicians hate systems like this because in elections there are many parties involved and when blockchain technology eliminates this it will harm several parties where politicians and business people play in it. and therefore blockchain technology is not used today, but that does not rule out the possibility that in the future governments will adopt blockchain technology.

What you said is true, blockchain as decentralized stuff, if been allowed to be used for such activity like election I think the purpose for it existence has been conquered, the political gurus won't even allow such to happen because of their dubious and negative motives, this process is only needed for monetary aspects, the political elites doesn't support a transparent system where everything that happens will be monitored and recorded exactly as it is suppose to be and again a particular organisation might be given access to this system by the party in power and this in turn will make the process and the system to look very fake and untrusted, so I support what you said that it is better for it to only be used for financial purposes.

Blockchain can improve the quality of the democratic process and elections, but if there is no oversight from society, the election results can be manipulated or affect voter morale with negative propaganda and spreading lies. Therefore, the integrity of the elections is not limited to the nomination boxes, although it is essential in choosing voters.

This isn't the first time this sort of discussion is coming up, the BTC blockchain is transparent, immutable and public, so people suggest it could help in the credibility of elections as people would be able to follow the voting process as it happens, while i don't know how it would be implemented in elections, i am sure it is not something that too many governments want to use.

Credible elections can be achieved without a system like this, if only we had credible people in charge of the electoral system as well as honest politicians. In other words, the bigger problem is in the 'individual' and not the system.

Every solution definitely exists, the use of Blockchain for election voting can be used, but is it true as you say, can blockchain be a solution to cheating in the election process? I'm sure not. No matter how good the system is, if it is run corruptly and dishonestly, it's the same.

The system is tight enough to forbids any form of manipulations but the problem is that will the people allow for that, they will definitely go against the use of rather finds a means they can as well manipulate the data entry they are going to submit to the blockchain network, the issue we can have is that, if the people at the top which happens to be our political leaders are taken the challenge of making things work out, then the whole process would have been easier to achieve fairness, just as you see it with the bitcoin network, the transparency is there including trust and immutability.

There is truth in what you say. It seems that no election can be said to be clean and without cheating. Because whoever is strong and has a lot of money is the one who can win the election. Here in our country, I have never seen a clean election, especially since the use of smart machines is very easy for fraudulent people to use.

Now, if blockchain technology can be used for election vote counting, it will be better to say that it cannot be cheated by any political candidates to control it, in my opinion.

Using blockchain for voting is not impossible; in fact, it is. But, considering how the blockchain was designed to be open and decentralised, creating something similar to be used for elections will not be as decentralised as the blockchain because even the government that will design it will not be just and will have manipulated many things inside that can easily change the consensus on which it will work. We can get close to the perfection we want, but there will be some manipulation as long as the government is involved, and they will be in charge of its design.

Blockchain technology has so many uses outside Bitcoin and digital currency. A blockchain is basically a shared ledger of data. Importantly this ledger is tamper proof. Once data has been recorded it can't be removed or altered without consensus of the whole system. So there is no single point of failure like in a centralised system.

If a government were to implement Blockchain technology in elections. It wouldn't have all the features of a decentralised blockchain. It would be a private network where the government hold an authority to determine members and functions of each member. It can decide which members can participate in the network. It would select who would maintain shared copies of the ledger. And the government would have the ability to edit entries on the blockchain.
But it maintains the concept of immutability and consensus making an external attack on the system difficult.

So in short, Blockchain can very well be used in elections, but it wouldn't employ the same principles as bitcoin does. It would still be centralised and there would still be avenues for corruption.

But the blockchain is transparent, which means it could serve the purpose. Remember that the government can control their own database and manipulate data, but with blockchain, every transaction is created once and for all, no one can hide the database or do anything at all. Of course not everyone will know how to verify the elections result (tech savvy) if it was implemented but people who know how to do that will do it will verify all the transactions. Just like running the bitcoin node which I’m currently doing  :-*

One thing I can say about the idea of using Blockchain technology for elections is that it varies from one country to another. if electronic election is currently possible in your country well mine it's not even with the few attempts that seems to have succeed yet it's still manipulated.

With the rate of corruption in electoral process I believe it's very much good to use Blockchain technology as a means to achieve free and fair election that will produce the accurate result but there are still so many disadvantages attached to it that's why the idea can't really be bought for now.

I have seen ideas like this before, the transparency of blockchain is what makes it a good option for a country voting system. But just like any countries in the world, I doubt that no one will ever try this given that there are no such honest country. I personally believe that there are some manipulation on voting on every countries in the world. These politicians that are currently sitting won't let this kind of fairness, unless they have extra plans to manipulate or cheat the voting even if it is on the blockchain. One example of this is dummies that will be voting on their side.

I would rather have a round table of 100,000 unique citizen presidents of all communities tiny and large making decisions needed for their own unique communal situations than some cookie cutter 1 fits all people crapola... better imo than 1 meathead like biden making the US look like r-tards

It seems that in the future there will be updates to the election process.. ;D ;D

I think there is added value too, especially in terms of performance in inputting election results data. If you use the Blockchain system in elections, perhaps the level of transparency can be higher, meaning that once the data has been entered, it cannot be tampered with any more, just like the current performance system for digital money.

of course. Everything is in the hands of the stakeholders, if they are seen as capable of solving problems without problems, they will definitely look for ways to be more transparent, besides that now the culture of voters also prefers privacy in voting and perhaps the costs and infrastructure will also be large if integrating blockchain technology into the election system.

Blockchain is a new technology but it is not so new that politicians have never heard of it. But so far, they have no intention of including it in the voting system in elections for some reason. So it can be said that blockchain can change and bring more fairness in elections thanks to its transparency, but the problem is that they do not want and do not intend to make everything transparent and fair. 

Regarding politics, I don't think everything will just stop at vote fraud, but I think everything is planned and scripted in advance. The person who comes to power is predetermined and not based on votes as we expected. Not everyone wants fairness and transparency.

if you had made a personal research on how block chain technology could be applied in your country electoral system to make it better that what it is now, it would have been better than this.

Creating a system that allows voters monitor their entire voting process has been the desire of most nations and this has led to the use of the bivas, E voting and what have you, these are all fantastic systems that could reduce the rate of manipulation from the side of the politicians but at the end of the day, most elections are not always decentralized as it's always influenced by authorities.

It can definitely change the future of election but not the system of how we do election. Blockchain will only upgrade or elevate what the current voting system but not the system itself, it's a good way to prevent the cheating of the votes and the tampering or the addition of zombie or flying voters to the ballots thus preventing the undeserving and corrupt candidates to have a fighting chance and the vote will be fair and square. Hopefully though, it's not just the machines that we use for voting changes though, I believe that we also need to change the way we vote because in most countries, it's more on the popularity and less on merits that the candidate have, the populist way is a fighting chance for the irresponsible candidates to take on the office and waste the public funds.

Well i think using blockchain for elections could amp up security, making it harder to tamper with results. It's decentralized, which is a plus, but we'd need to weigh the pros and cons, like how user-friendly it is. Before diving in, we should check if the benefits outweigh the practical challenges.The government should work harder before actually implementing anything

I doubt blockchain is a solution for voting. While it of course technically could be used, I don't think the amazing things about blockchain really fit to the needs of an election very well.

For elections it'd have to be a centralized blockchain, and you'd have to have some way to control not only each person only having one account, but also make sure nobody can access another's account, and not have people worry about key management just to vote because you know millions of people would forget/lose their keys. With the changes needed to make it work well for the use case of voting I don't think what we'd have would be very similar to today what we think of as blockchains.

Something you feed into the blockchain can never be changed afterwards, but the real problem is that you can't ever guarantee that what is fed into the blockchain is bullet-proof in the first place. But the blockchain isn't to be blamed for that. For as long as you can interfere with either the bridge (a centralized server or digital box as you said) between a person casting a vote and the blockchain, the data might be tampered with.

But there are other examples that the blockchain can't solve. How do you make sure that a voter truthfully casts a vote for something that the person believes in or - without any external manipulation - deems to be the right vote? If the idea is to get the most correct elections possible, there is a ton of things that need to be solved.

• Disinformation
• Bribery
• Coercion
• etc...

So even if you solve the problem of fake ID's submitting a vote or wrong counting or multiple submissions by the same ID or removed/destroyed/lost submissions, you can never guarantee that all as per the blockchain valid submissions come from a person that has not been bribed, not been manipulated or coerced, or anything else that comes to your mind which could interfere with that person's free will and opinion. Some problems can be solved with the blockchain in election processes, but by now I more and more get the feeling that the real problems like AI manipulation and disinformation aren't among those solvable problems.