Does the Blockchain technology have a chance of affecting voting and elections in the world?

The honest and open expression of the citizens’ will is the main component of democracy. At the same time, people's propensity to take everything at face value often has a devastating effect. Questionable results of sociological research, electoral fraud, rigging of testing results – we all have had first-hand experience of these problems. We have decided to create the VOTES platform, which will enable to organize transparent and fair voting from school examinations to the presidential elections.

The main difficulty in carrying out voting and polling has always been the centralized recording and storage of the information on votes. According to English urban writer Adam Greenfield, in theory, the blockchain technology underlying cryptocurrencies could serve as a base for managing just about anything — from the protest movement to a state organized on the principles of an impartial collective democracy.

Such technology can be used not only for state elections, but also for voting by the board of directors. In this case, a smart-contract can be used, which will be executed immediately upon receipt of a certain number of votes.

Blockchain can even become a tool for budgeting with public participation. This experience has already been tested in the Brazilian port of Alegre. The number of people involved in this increased from 900 in the first year to over 30,000 in the early 2000s. It seems that this process had quite positive consequences. By 2004, 99.5% of the population of Porto Alegre was connected to the water supply and 83% to sewage systems. Municipal budgeting tripled the number of children in municipal schools. The attractiveness of this process is that the participation of citizens in politics leads to concrete results, and the people can see them. This process has fans among the entire political spectrum. The World Bank admires it for its transparency and effective investment climate. It is warmly supported by civil groups for the redistribution of power and the absolute democracy that it creates.

The blockchain technology has also been used in the party elections.

In 2014, at the annual meeting of party members of the Danish party Liberal Alliance, the party leadership used the distributed registry technology. In 2016, the election of candidates for a number of internal posts at the Congress of the Libertarian Party of the United States in Texas involved a blockchain machine for counting votes.

In 2017, the Flux Party was founded in Australia, which used tokens for voting and selection of proxies for the subsequent voting in the parliament. The Republican Party of Utah used blockchain in voting for candidates in the primaries. 59,000 Republicans from Utah (2017) signed up to participate in the blockchain-based voting.

The results lived up to the expectations, but the organizers of these initiatives found it difficult to prepare their own technical platform.

Obviously, the next stage in the world development of voting models will be the emergence of a universal platform, which will be able to quickly and easily provide any level of voting using the blockchain technology. The VOTES will become a platform that will enable to organize transparent and fair voting, polls, elections, and examinations.

According to the forecast by VOTES project, by 2020, the volume of the voting and polling market based on modern technologies and blockchain will reach 5 billion people. Most of the state elections will be organized through online services using distributed databases.