Disrupting and transforming voting markets
Blockchain technology has the unique ability to fundamentally change the way groups make decisions, express opinions, and appoint representatives to office. And it’s about time!
Voters want a say in the communities and organizations in which they live or that impact their everyday lives. This natural inclination, which in days past has launched revolutions and mutinies, has matured into formal group decision-making systems reliant on voting. But voting methodologies have not changed and evolved to meet the demands of the hyper-connected, mobile, real-time world in which we live. The disconnect between the way everything else works (faster, quicker, more efficient) versus the outdated, centralized and opaque voting systems of today, leaves voters either apathetic or disenfranchised — particularly in the case of those newer democracies with low income and remote populations.
In short, despite the expansion of democratic systems and advancement of technology — or perhaps because of these things — we have a “voting problem”. Until now, there’s hasn’t been an appropriate solution.
In the past, participants in democratic systems relied on a show of hands, shouts of “yay” or “nay” in a forum, or the toss of a pebble into an urn to cast their vote. Today, elections use paper or electronic ballots to collect votes from larger populations of voters. Despite some evolutions, running an election still requires almost blind trust in centralized election procedures and the ability of election holders to accurately tally results. What’s worse, newer voting methods are prone to cheating and manipulation and are unable to scale without reinforcing or — in the case of electronic voting — magnifying these problems.
Voters are left to simply accept election results, as it’s almost impossible to contest them unless you are part of the “system” that controls the election. Elections are extremely centralized and costly; recounts are time-consuming. Blockchain — in our mobile, interconnected world — will change all that.
A distributed and immutable ledger improves the way votes are cast and grants anyone the ability to verify and audit results. But most importantly, blockchain dis-intermediates the officials from controlling, interfering or being involved with the election once a voters vote is cast. Blockchain voting has the ability to protect voter anonymity, guard against double-voting, and allow elections to be conducted in areas with distributed populations without investing in costly infrastructure. Instead of penalizing voters, elections with compulsory voting systems can offer voter incentives. Corporate and nongovernmental systems can also lower the cost of elections by attracting sponsors. In general, blockchain voting systems will be more secure, cost less and return trust in the process by allowing voters to self-verify and third parties to instantly audit results.
There are, on average, a minimum of 350,000 ballots cast per hour in global government, NGO, and corporate voting ecosystems. In a blockchain based voting world, there would be at least five times that number globally given the potential pool of eligible voters who simply do not vote either due to apathy, budget, or access. An inherently distributed, transparent and tamperproof voting platform, one that enables voter rewards, can inject a much-needed transformation in how elections are run, drive trust, and increase participation in the voting market.
Blockchain will disrupt voting. It’s just a matter of when.
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