How voting on the blockchain finds its application in politics and business

The results of the presidential election in the United States for many turned out to be a complete surprise. However, the voting mechanism itself and its technological side have not undergone revolutionary changes. And the very concept of collective decision making is common both in politics and in other areas - for example, in finance. Is there a chance for the distributed registry technology to influence the voting process? We, the Wirex payment blockchain service team , decided to publish material on the prospects of distributed technologies for organizing the voting process, both within political institutions and beyond.

According to English writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield, the underlying blockchain technology in Bitcoin could theoretically serve as a basis for managing anything from protest to the state based on the principles of impartial collective democracy.

A relatively recent and actively developing technology of “distributed consensus” is described as something that can bring new forms of collective and conscious human interaction. Thanks to her, any group of people can come together in a kind of non-hierarchical association, which has capabilities comparable to those of a state or a corporation.

According to Greenfield , the idea is that government structures at almost every level of the organization of society in the future may be replaced by voluntary associations represented by software products. Members of such groups can remain anonymous to each other if they wish, but their identities will be confirmed, and the authenticity of their will is established through the same processes that guarantee the security of the Bitcoin network. This means that every vote will be recorded and, if necessary, is always available for subsequent rechecking. As in Bitcoin's work, an attacker cannot substitute one voice without changing the entire chain of preceding blocks, which contain encrypted data about votes.
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In theory, the blockchain can even become a tool for the practical implementation of budgeting with public participation on any scale in the spirit of historical precedent in the Brazilian Port Alegre.

To date, the blockchain is already used in politics - for the conduct of internal party elections.

One of the first concepts of voting on the blockchain was the initiative of the Danish Liberal Alliance ( Liberal Alliance ). In 2014, the party’s leadership proposed using the technology of the distributed registry when conducting internal voting at the annual meeting of party members in Vidovre , a suburb of Copenhagen. Interest in the blockchain technology was caused by the autonomy of its work, which does not require the intervention of an intermediary. According to a statement made by a party representative at the time, the blockchain allows you to “look under the hood” and see what happens during the voting process.

In February of this year, Australian bitcoin enthusiasts Max Kay and Nathan Spataro created the Flux Party . The concept proposed by the founders involves the election of six senators who will not take the initiative themselves, but will be able to support or reject the proposals of all who are members of the party. The Flow Party model involves the use of tokens, which can either be used for self-voting or transferred to competent trustees. Six elected senators with representative functions will vote in parliament for various legislative initiatives according to the distribution of votes of participants in the party blockchain system.

In March, the Libertarian Party of the United States announced its intention to use blockchain technology in electing candidates for internal party positions in Texas. Thanks to the hardware and software provided by Blockchain Technologies Corp., a New York-based company, representatives of the political association managed to organize the counting and counting of votes using the blockchain technology. Three QR codes were placed at the bottom of each ballot: the first QR code contained the blockchain address, the second was the ballot ID, and the third was the voting ID. After scanning QR codes, the data on votes in favor of one or another candidate were entered into the blockchain, which protects the results from falsification. A total of 250 delegates took part in the “Texan” vote. Blockchain machines developed by Blockchain Technologies Corp. may in the future compete with the counting machines currently used in the United States.

In the USA, this is not the first case of using the blockchain technology in voting. In March, the Utah Republican Party used the blockchain to vote for candidates during the primaries. According to Wired , 59,000 Republicans from Utah registered to vote on the blockchain. Technological support for the electoral process was provided by the British company Smartmatic .

In February, in Kiev, a group of volunteers and activists from public organizations signed a memorandum on the development of the blockchain service for voting E-vox. The system is designed to ensure transparency of voting results at all levels - from municipal elections to the election of parliamentarians. The system developer was Ambisafe . As the main advantage, the creators of the service note the absence of intermediaries affecting the election results. The voting results recorded in the blockchain are open and can be used by government agencies to make strategic decisions. The development process of E-vox also involves the creation of open source software that conforms to the MIT license. The E-vox technology is based on the Ethereum blockchain. At the end of August this year, the E-vox team announced the upcoming launch of the blockchain voting solution e-Vox: NaRada in the city Rada Balta of the Odessa region.

From the point of view of the organization of popular voting, the British writer Greenfield mentioned above cites relatively fresh projects: Backfeed and democracy.earth . They, in his opinion, are ambitious ideas of a collective network of civil society.

These tools confirm the legitimacy of operations with the help of calculations alone, without relying on the authority of any government or banking institution. The solutions provided by Greenfield provide organizers with the opportunity to unite people into groups as soon as possible, providing clear, safe and responsible decision-making processes to all participants. Such techniques allow you to put forward proposals, raise questions for discussion in a team of equal members, giving them enough time to think before submitting a question to a vote.

Among the advantages of blockchain technology in voting, the British writer and urbanist Greenfield highlights :

• The opportunity for network users to participate in public life right from their laptop (or smartphone, or gaming platform). With this approach, anyone who, because of his work activity or the need to take care of a child and fulfill family obligations, may become involved in this process, is too exhausted or simply does not have time to attend the meeting where decisions are made.
• Preventing the interception of an initiative by one of the participants trying to use the meeting for personal gain.
• No need to gather all stakeholders in a certain place and at a certain time to make decisions on everyday issues. Thus, people would be able to get an opportunity to take part in public life when it is convenient for them and in the way it suits them.
• The ability to compare decisions taken by different authorities or jurisdictions, or to compare them with the results of past local voting. All the details of the public process of self-determination can also be available to everyone. Each participant can check both his own voice and make sure that the votes of other participants are accurate.

Technology blockchain is of interest not only in politics. In our post on blockchain usage in Estonia , we mentioned the case of successful application of distributed registry technology for organizing voting of stockholders on the NASDAQ Estonian stock exchange. The results of the February pilot launch confirmed the advantages of the blockchain, which consists in the inability to change the voting data, as well as the ability to see its results remotely from mobile devices or personal computers.

In April of this year, the National Settlement Depository of the Russian Federation announced the successful results of a test launch of the blockchain voting system for bondholders. As a basis for the development of the solution, the NXT blockchain platform was used. The development was carried out in collaboration with DSX Technologies. The results of the company published on GitHub . The prototype uses the ISO 20022 electronic exchange standard . Messaging is cascading through chains of nominal holders from both the issuer to the holder of securities and in the opposite direction.

The organization of the transmission and counting of instructions for voting lies with NSD. Distributed register of e-proxy voting is supported simultaneously by all voters. Registration of voting instructions takes place in the blockchain.

NSD's solution developers announced a performance of 80 operations per second for networking of 10–20 nodes. According to Eddie Astanin, Chairman of the Board of Directors of NSD, the blockchain development designed for voting makes it possible to receive up to 100 thousand votes per hour. The pilot launch participants were offered only 2 types of questions that require a yes, no, I don't know, or a choice of answers from the list.

In October of this year, the financial company Broadridge invested $ 95 million in the blockchain. According to preliminary data, Broadridge plans to use the technology in developing solutions designed to organize the voting of shareholders. Blockchain provides transparency and the possibility of remote participation in the corporate electoral process.

If we consider the blockchain technology in the voting at the state level, immediately there are some problems with the introduction of new technologies. Greenfield cites statistics, according to which just over 60% of North Americans have smart devices, and this is clearly not enough to organize a full network voting.

The general enthusiasm for the universality of blockchain technologies also cooled the attack on The DAO, when the attacker managed to find a vulnerability and withdraw about $ 53 million. The precedent with the distributed autonomous organization based on Ethereum demonstrated a lack of reliability of the blockchain technology.

Voting on the blockchain at the state level has not only failed to become mainstream, but so far has not even formed into a complete case in any of the world states. But, as the experience of parties in the United States, Denmark and Australia, as well as the pilot case of NSD, shows, the voting on the blockchain can already be effectively used within relatively narrow and specialized associations.