Blockchain voting is it possible?

The first thing that pops in people minds after we say voting is election voting. But voting can be done for numerous things out there and is being done every day for something. How can we make sure that the voting process is fair? How we can ensure that there is no corruption, how to make it more transparent and know for sure that voting is legit and done right as it should be? Blockchain can offer us an escape and help us to make sure that everything is fair and according to the rules as we are told everything is, it can give us another check mark that we know for sure that everything is right as it is supposed to be.

Brief overview of how this could be done

Firstly people will have to register to vote somehow, this can be done by enabling them to register to the system with central entity that we all trust – for instance for elections this entity is our goverments. This entity needs to give us some kind of a key that will enable us to vote. For instance one aspect of this key could be a representation of a token that we get, every time we get different token or so for voting. So that the specific token is tied to the specific thing and time that we are voting for. This token is there to prevent double spending as we can all track where the token moved as everything is made public who voted for what.

So that the voting is decentralized fully – there is central entity that has to handle the people their keys but as everything is public they have to play according the rules or others will notice that something is not right.

Voting security

There are a lot of issues tied to the security of voting when you think about it. As it is in the best interest of the voters to know everything a transparent way is the best way. A transparent way with blockchain opens a lot of possibilities.

As people are verified before voting and given the keys so that officials and voters can be sure everything was done fairly and that everything is counted in the correct way. With the distributed ledger – blockchain , there is no central entity that needs to be trusted for the data as every vote is verified by the network ensuring that there is no risk of security.

Last thoughts….

As we as a society advances we are moving to the technology to help us with many things. Now with AI on the horizon we are even delegating as much as we can there and there is no doubt that there will be some kind of online or voting via our computer/devices in the future. As blockchain is not something old nor something young still it has a potential and real use case in this area, the voting. If we are going to move digital for this, we better look at our options and blockchain is great solution for this problem.