How Blockchain Restores Trust in Polls and Surveys
For businesses, government, students, and many kinds of researcher, surveys, and polls are an invaluable tool. They are so much a part of the fabric of our society, that we often almost take them for granted. However, the influence of surveys and polls can be far-reaching and powerful. What is their impact when poorly done, and how can emerging technologies help to secure the integrity of the process?
Electoral Voting
At the very highest level, a democratic election is a process that relies on robust and honest polling mechanisms. In many cases across the world, the integrity of the election process has been cast into doubt through allegations of rigged voting systems or voter fraud.
The 2016 US Presidential campaign was fraught with accusations of voter fraud, mostly issued from now-President Donald Trump. Although it is has been established that much of this alleged fraud probably didn’t happen, the allegations created a perception among many Republican voters that the 2016 election was rigged, reducing trust in the overall electoral process.
Countries less democratic than the US suffer from similar issues. During the 2012 Russian Presidential elections, there were reports of “carousel voters,” supporters who were bussed around to cast multiple votes for Vladimir Putin.
Some countries use electronic voting machines (EVMs) in the belief that they are less prone to manipulation of the overall voting process. Some EVMs use biometric technology such as retina scanning to ensure that each person only gets one vote, for which they must have registered.
However, even the most secure EVMs may be susceptible to hackers. This is why many developed countries such as Germany and the Netherlands have not adopted electronic voting. They consider their tried-and-tested manual vote counting solutions a preferable solution that doesn’t need changing. Nevertheless, relying on humans for the vote-counting process is not a foolproof solution.
Exit and Political Opinion Polls
During many elections, independent surveys are used to gauge public opinion ahead of the election, or voters are asked for their stance as they leave the voting stations. These kinds of polls often produce inaccurate results, as in the case of the 2016 UK Brexit vote where polls wrongly predicted, more than once, that the Remain vote would prevail.
Often the reason that these polls are wrong relates to the sampling method. As it is impossible to poll the entire voting population, researchers will select a sample of people to survey who should be representative of the overall population. However, this is extremely difficult to get right.
For example, using an internet poll is likely to exclude voters in the older generation who may not spend time online. Similarly, calling voters on their home telephones will probably include only those older voters who are at home, and still have a fixed line phone. Some people get tired of the effort of participating in surveys, or don’t want to give their political opinion because they don’t trust in the confidentiality of the process. So a truly representative sample can be difficult to come by, meaning survey results can be skewed.
Scientific Studies
Surveys are frequently used by scientists who are researching specific areas of human behavior. The media, in particular, love reporting on scientific survey results, as they often provide the opportunity for attention-grabbing headlines that draw in readers. The results often become disseminated into the public consciousness as truth.
This becomes even more likely in epidemiological studies where researchers examine the role of human behavior in diseases. Recently, there has been much hype around a particular French study of 70,000 people which purportedly showed that eating organic food could prevent cancer. News outlets leaped on the story until some within the scientific community eloquently pointed out that the results were not conclusive, describing the questionnaire used to measure organic food consumption as “simplistic.”.
This highlights another problem in using survey and polls — often there is a lack of transparency in the questions used, and the results or conclusions end up as the subject of reports.
Business Surveys
Many businesses make extensive use of surveys particularly in the area of customer satisfaction, either by email or using online platforms. Websites like booking.com or tripadvisor.com have put the customer survey at the core of their business model. In the case of booking.com, each customer who completes a booking has the opportunity to go in and rate the property. With Tripadvisor, literally anyone with a user account can leave a review of any hotel, restaurant or activity.
The problem with such extensive use of customer surveys is that it creates fatigue among the customer base. This fatigue means that most people won’t leave a review for a mediocre or even a good experience — they are more likely to answer review surveys if they feel they have something to complain about.
Furthermore, many people don’t trust in the anonymity of customer review surveys, fearing that a bad review will mean they receive even worse service next time. Even worse, customers have reported that businesses have sought legal retribution for them having left bad reviews.
Employees participating in surveys have similar concerns. Poor feedback in an employee satisfaction survey that isn’t anonymous could risk a boss finding out the answers. Many will worry these answers could have a negative impact on future earnings, promotion opportunities, or even job security.
How Blockchain Restores Trust
The above examples illustrate that while surveys and polls are an entirely necessary part of everyday life, there are fundamental issues with trust and transparency recurring across each use case. While technology can’t solve all the flaws in survey methodology, the use of blockchain is now bringing greater transparency to the overall process.
Using a public blockchain to record voting in any given survey has the potential to ensure that firstly, each voter only gets one vote. This is possible through the use of key encryption, where each voter provides their unique private key for casting their vote. Secondly, each vote can be verified because it is recorded publicly on the blockchain where it is visible to all. Privacy protocols can ensure that only the relevant information (that the vote was cast) is included, and confidential information (which way the person voted) is kept secure.
Because blockchains maintain a permanent, unchangeable database, each vote is stored securely. Once it is input, it cannot be changed or tampered with in any way. Blockchains also allow distributed application (dApp) layers so the user interface can be straightforward. A voter only has to download an app to their smartphone or access the relevant webpage, and they can easily participate in the poll or survey in question.
Case Study
The Blockchain Party of the Netherlands recently used a blockchain-based survey tool to raise awareness about the benefits of implementing blockchain for facilitating dialogue between the citizens and the government.
Using this blockchain-based survey tool, the Party was able to quickly generate a cost-effective survey solution, saving both time and money over other survey methods. With a smartphone app, survey participants could easily provide their responses, which were recorded on the blockchain securely, and with full transparency. Each voter could verify their own entries, with the overall result that the reliability and therefore trust in the survey process was improved compared to traditional survey methods.
During the survey, thousands of citizens answered more than 100 questions via their mobile phones. The result was presented at the national parliament as evidence of blockchain’s capability to establish a clear and transparent connection between citizens and their political leaders.
The future benefits of such a tool even in this one instance are highly valuable. The Blockchain Party could increase loyalty and engagement for its cause, through demonstrating the power of blockchain to create a credible and transparent form of online citizen participation. The data collected is trustworthy, making it highly valuable to anyone wanting to understand more about people’s beliefs in the area of blockchain adoption.
Of the success of the project, Arnold Berghuis from the Blockchain Party said, “With Blockchain technology we can solve the problem of Kafka: bureaucracy. We can organize society in a smarter way. We’ve got lots of problems because of technology, and we’ll solve them with technology”.
Extrapolating to Further Use Cases
From a business and research perspective, there are immediate benefits to be gained from adopting blockchain-based research tools, given the barriers to entry are low. Blockchain survey tools could be applied in customer or employee satisfaction surveys, or in the areas of academic and scientific research, quickly and at a relatively low cost compared with implementing traditional survey tools.
It will probably take some time before blockchain-based voting tools are available in local or national elections. However, given time and continued adoption, perhaps in future we could be casting our electoral votes on blockchain-enabled machines at the voting station, or even eventually on our own smartphones. Whether or not this ever happens, anyone else using surveys or polls in their work or research stands to gain much from the adoption of blockchain.
Sarah is a freelance writer, researcher and blockchain expert covering blockchain for Coincentral.com and for tech startups. She is also a full time traveller and foodie.
Blockchain Business Review from Apla provides high-quality educational material from the world of blockchain to inform the business community of the competitive advantage that can be gained by integrating distributed ledger data storage within organizations. Our mission is to promote knowledge about blockchain and its uses in both the private and public sector and demonstrate the value of blockchain integration.
