Blockchain To Play A Vital Role In Forthcoming US Elections

The US general elections are fast approaching and the authorities don’t want to leave any stone unturned. They are taking it pretty seriously this time. In United States, the elections are a huge and prodigious affair swallowing colossal expense every time they happen. To save the election costs and to make the process fast, secure and more streamlined, the electoral authorities of America are working on a new voting module. Chances are that the new voting module will be using the blockchain technology for the first time and it’s definitely going to change a lot. The traditional voting scheme required a lot of paper work but with blockchain, it won't be a problem. Besides, when it comes to online threats, there’s not a slightest bit of chance of that happening as it will be secured by the most advanced form of cryptography ever existed.

Also read Software Developers Are Now Taking Blockchain Courses.

It has been ratified without a doubt that blockchain could be an effective tool for overcoming the persisting vulnerabilities in the traditional voting system. Being the key technology behind bitcoin and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies, blockchain has a huge scope and potential to outrun the ageing technologies. Smart and secure e-Voting is one of the many applications of blockchain technology.

What Is Blockchain And How It Works?

Blockchain is basically a public ledger that stores information and keeps the it cryptographically secured. Blockchain is composed of a series of individual blocks where each block stores a small patch of information. It maintains a shared record of the information which distributed over large network of users. The idea behind blockchain was to create a decentralized system which is run by its peers rather than a central system or some middleman. This is precisely what blockchain is. Blockchain follows a Peer-to-Peer model and negates the conventional approach of centralized system.

The blockchain network was primarily built for bitcoin which happens to be the world’s first digital currency. Bitcoin used blockchain technology to maintain a tamper-proof record of all the transactions and keeping the transactions secure. In the days that followed, bitcoin attained immense success. And being open-source in nature, bitcoin paved ways for hundreds of new cryptocurrencies to emerge. Some examples are Litecoin, Ripple, Ether, Dash, DAO and Dogecoin. All the these cryptocurrencies were based on the original bitcoin source-code provided by Satoshi Nakamoto, the so called creator of bitcoin. Since they’re all bitcoin alternatives, they are also called Altcoins and they also used blockchain for recording transactions.

How e-Voting Can Benefit From Blockchain?

Apart its high-end cryptographic protection, the greatest endowment of blockchain is that it provides transparency to the network. For instance, in case of bitcoin, you can see all the recent transactions made by the users along with their wallet address. This is how it can be very helpful in e-Voting.

To put this into terms, if there happens to be any malicious attempt to fiddle with the voting data, it will be visible to the authorities so that they can take timely measures to avert the threat. Christopher Franko, the chief president at Borderless Tech group is certain that blockchain technology will prove to be a game-changer if employed in the forthcoming US elections. He says that the voting data once collected over the blockchain will remain intact for years to come. And in the worst case scenario, if there happens to be a malicious attempt, then at least it will be visible to them so they take an early action. Although it is very likely to happen, we still have to wait as the electoral authorities are in no mood to make a fuss out of it. So it would be interesting to see if that really happens or not.