Over the past recent years Kenya and Africa at large have been facing problems every time it comes to the election period, claims of electoral interference and manipulation have caused great mistrust towards many governments. Allegations of voting fraud have been particularly prevalent under dictatorial regimes in Africa. Across the continent, centralized control of the voting process may be part of the problem and in fact, arguably may have caused more harm than good. e. People have had their human rights violated and their fundamental freedoms provided by their constitution taken away. In such an atmosphere, having a fair and transparent election is something that is paramount for the freedom most people enjoy today. The pitfalls of the current system of ballot voting are being taken advantage of by people or organizations looking to gain power.
The current ballot system does offer anonymity to the voter but the counting process is not transparent. People are supposed to trust the result which is provided by an Election commission or a government body. This makes the process of counting, a major vulnerability in the current process. There are also other major electoral scams such as voter fraud, ballot stuffing and booth capturing. All these make it very difficult for organizers of an election to distinguish between the actual votes and votes added without authorization.
You ever wonder, what if blockchain was introduced to this scenario, to be used for voting, A blockchain is a database that stores encrypted blocks of data then chains them together to form a chronological single-source-of-truth for the data. Digital assets are distributed instead of copied or transferred, creating an immutable record of an asset. The asset is decentralized, allowing full real-time access and transparency to the public. A transparent ledger of changes preserves integrity of the document, which creates trust in the asset. Blockchain’s inherent security measures and public ledger make it a prime technology for almost every single sector.
Blockchain have been used for cryptocurrencies for a while now and in the managing of different DAOs in the internet, it keeps all the record since when someone initiated either to send or receive any digital item. Links all the transactions when initiated, halfway through till delivery, it does this with transparency to all the parties involved and stores all the transactions from one node to another,
It has great potential to decrease organizational costs and increase voter turnout. Thus making it more advantageous. It’s not only financial transactions that work with blockchain, but any type of data transmission. This kind of system infrastructure is extremely useful for voting because a vote is a small piece of high-value data. Out of necessity, modern voting systems are largely stuck in the last century, and those that want to vote must leave their homes and submit paper ballots to a local authority. Why not bring this process online. Blockchain is paving the way for a direct democracy. We should give it a warm welcome.