Blockchain and Democracy 2.0 in India — Part 2

In the previous part, I explained the Preamble to the Constitution of India, status of democracy in India, types of democracies and their advantages and disadvantages, electoral processes in India, and about Liquid Democracy and how can it be used in the organisations and communities. This part focuses more in detail about Sovereign, a Blockchain-based, Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, Censorship-Resistant Liquid Democracy Platform.
What is Blockchain?
The first and foremost thing to note here is that Blockchain is not Bitcoin. Blockchain is the underlying technology behind Bitcoins. For example, a Diesel engine is not a car. A car is built on the technology of a Diesel engine, but they are different.
Simply, Blockchain is a database that is validated by a wider community, instead of a central authority. It is a collection of records that a crowd oversees and maintains, rather than relying on a single entity, like a bank or any organisation, which most likely hosts data on a particular server that can be easily tampered with by anyone. Each “block”contains certain number of transaction records(anything of value, votes, money, songs, data) and “chain” links all the blocks with something called as a hash function. Every 10 minutes (in case of Bitcoin Blockchain) all the transactions are combined together and form a block which is then cryptographically linked to the previous block. Thus, a huge chain is formed called Blockchain.
Anything that relies on access to a database can benefit from using Blockchain technology.
In the same way, as you do not need how a mobile or internet works to use them, I will not go too much into detail of how a Blockchain works. In case, you are interested in that, you can read a very good guide here.
Properties of Blockchain and relevance to Elections in India
- Decentralised- It means that Election Commission of India will not be the single authority to organise elections. Every citizen of India is sovereign enough to check, count, tally, and audit the votes which are given to any candidate. Thus, this is an open-system which can be scrutinised by anyone.
- Immutable- Your vote cannot be tampered with. If you have voted for Candidate A, it means that the vote goes to the Candidate A. It can be verified by anyone on the network. No one can change your vote and if someone tries to, the whole network will know about that.
- Censorship-Resistant- Voters do not need to face any censorship from anyone.
- Secure- The ECI spends crores of rupees to secure the Electronic Voting Machines, booths, people, and to organise elections. That is public money and considering the political climate of India, where elections are held in some part or other every year, securing becomes a tough and costly job. Because of cryptography, security becomes less of an issue.
- Open Source- The whole code of blockchain is open-sourced and is maintained by the dedicated community. Nothing is censored in the silos of major corporations or the government and everyone can see and check the code and implementation of the network.
What are Decentralised IDs?
Two requirements of a Self-Sovereign Online ID
- It should be free from fake identities (see here)
- No single authority to issue identities (currently only ECI issues Voting ID and if your name is not in the Electoral Rolls, you have practically lost your right to vote in the government formation, thus in the decision-making)
The online identities should be able to prove that someone is living and that the ID is singular, i.e. for each there is a single person and for every single person, there is just one ID (called key in the crypto parlance).
What we have currently in India is Aadhar, the world’s largest database of biometric IDs. This system is not safe, is faked, has left citizens out from the registers resulting in deaths, stolen food, and no registrations in the system.
To solve the above problems, we devise a new system of voluntary self-identification of a sovereign and then verification of the sovereign by the “little brothers”, that is peer-to-peer identification. For example, I can verify myself, and my friends and family can be verified by me, because I personally know them. That is the power of community. Those identities are stored in the blockchain where no one can tamper with them or make sovereigns identity-less. This identity should expire after a period of time, so that only genuine sovereigns remain in the system, and duplicates and dead people are weeded out, thus increasing security of the system.
The second method is called Attention Mining, in which human judges that the other person is a human and not a machine. There are some methods to do that for example, video chats or chatrooms incorporating Natural Language Processing, that can distinguish human from a machine. It, just like Democracy, is a work-in-progress and more work is needed on that.
What is Sovereign?
Sovereign is a decentralised governance platform for small & large organisations.
- It is a liquid democracy toolkit having voting and delegation of votes, ballots with multiple options, bottom-up system of proposals.
- Mobile and Desktop Responsive UX
- Transaction engine based on voting tokens
PS: The platform is still a work under progress. Please feel free to contribute. Refer democracy.earth
Challenges and Way Forward
Although, the platform and the software looks promising, there are some fundamental challenges pertaining to India as of now, but soon they will be away.
- Smartphone Penetration- Although India has one of the highest number of smartphones in the world, yet the network infrastructure and penetration is low.
- Internet Infrastructure- India still needs to have a robust, fast internet especially in the far-flung areas where internet accessibility is still a major issue.
To read more about Democracy, Politics, and Blockchain, please refer to this document titled “The Social Smart Contract”
All the above things are done to choose representatives for us, whereas we can altogether avoid the whole costs and complexity by taking the route of Liquid Democracy, making our citizens sovereign in the truest sense and strengthening our democracy further, making India, apart from the largest democracy in the world, the BEST democracy in the world.
As is true with the Democracy, this platform will be made stronger when more and people participate in it, share their constructive criticism, and ensure that we have a free, open, fair society where eveyone’s voice is heard.
According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.”
