Blockchain Technology will Transform Democracy with a Transparent ‘Ballot Box’

May 12 17:52 2022

Blockchain has the potential to drive social change and create new societal perceptions. This factor is due to its ability to enable trust in private and public institutions. More so, blockchain can save the depreciating trust in democratic processes by bringing democracy on-chain.

Democracy On-chain

The world has come to accept wholly “the unsustainable, wack-noisy and seemingly obscured ‘Big Idea,’ as tagged by most near-sighted technocrats and journalists in 2008 when it first made its public appearance. The Big idea was the blockchain technology. 

At the moment, the noise has grown louder, insurmountable even; as centralized entities such as banks, insurance companies, corporate societies and the sorts are now culling up inventive ways to merge with this growing technology—who wouldn’t? At least, not with the nascent wave of NFTs, stable coins, minting tokens, and decentralized financial protocols sprouting here and there like a stubborn weed, existing as a means of livelihood to people. 

In fact, even governments are not left out, turned-over by the economic and political shift happening, and are either on the verge of creating regulatory agencies to oversee the bull or trying to find new ways to incorporate its computational procedures into the political system.

At first, blockchain was a mere public record of transactions within the world of decentralized finance, a consensus-targeted proof. But not for too long; crypto-enthusiasts and participants have come to find out that it could be more than that, having found out that it is—to paraphrase Berg’s definition–a range of decentralized technologies that combine asymmetric cryptography, peer-to-peer networking, consensus-based mechanism, and a data-processing apparatus to create a kind of an immutable decentralized public ledger for storing and transferring digital assets. 

Its benefits set rigidly on a fast-paced, safe, and secure environment, have led many governments all over the world to embrace the conceptual algorithms of the blockchain technology; and they are willing to amalgamate it within the in-state administration, electoral systems and collective agendas, as an alternative to the traditional constitutional processes that have been on the frontier. 

The reason behind this recent outlook towards blockchain technologies stems from the fact that there has been an inexcusable decline in the strongholds of democracy, especially in the voting process, thereby eliciting lack of trust from the citizens. 

Issues of unequal right delegation, electoral malpractice, and inadequacy of accountability are always on the poise. A major example of the end product of these issues is the scandalous invasion of white house by citizens during the U. S. election in the Trumpian era. 

This, too, has also led to the institutionalizing of online voting by some countries such as Estonia and Norway which, disappointingly, wasn’t free from the raging mess—and to hammer the cup a bit more, even HBO documentaries like Hacking Democracy has gone ahead to precipitate the unreliability of the online voting system. 

Democracy, whether in its substantive, constitutional, or systemic jurisdictions, always has ‘the people’ at the centre of its revolution. It’s a majority-choice protocol. 

According to Dahl, a political scientist, there are five evaluation processes to real democracy: effective participation; voting equality; end-to-end enlightened understanding of the system (which entails that each and every citizen ought to have the same range of opportunity to assess different political exercises and policies); having full control of the agenda; inclusion of adults. These whole enlistments make the blockchain industry an alternative and proficient solution, due to its transparency, decentralization frameworks and immutability. To rephrase its creator in lieu of a solution tagline: blockchain is a platform for socio-economic liberation and decentralization.

There’s no doubt that the bulk of real democracy is subservient to an efficient, omission-free electoral process; that’s to say, a good voting system equals a good democratic system. 

In that case, blockchain can serve as a “transparent ballot box”, with its consensus protocols that invariably checks the validity of the inspected data. Either way, there will be no shortcomings since the security of blockchain springs from a specific data technology. 

On the question of immutability: blockchain are like data pockets since transactions or data are imprinted to a blockchain with a hash. This means that all transactions are dutifully stamped with a hash code which is broadcasted on the supposed network and governed by the participator, and however cannot be manipulated in any way. 

More than anything, the whole voting system in blockchain is based on “opinion consistency” rather than geographical orthodoxy, which helps to curb the unequal right to the assessment of any inspected data and reduces the cost of the whole process. 

The evidence of blockchain as a more effective solution is an endless sport. That’s not to say, perhaps, that blockchain technologies don’t have their own shortcomings. In fact, there’s often a problem of its code-holders staging a revolt, or a slew of hacks from outsiders. But the best thing is that these problems are cancellable. And truth be told, a world formed from the summary of blockchain and democracy, based on critical assessment, might be the new Utopia.

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