Post 12: Voting via Blockchain Technology.

India has always seen ‘voting’ for elections as the heart of its democratic nature. Voting has been considered as a Constitutional Right in India, under the garb of ‘universal suffrage’. Although, theoretically, a constitutional right, voting has a serious impact on the whole of a citizen’s Fundamental Rights. And even after that, the turnout comes to be around 60-70% only.

Now, there could be various reasons for an individual to choose to not vote, one of them being, commutation from remotest of areas to the Poll. Another being the individuals residing outside of the Country during the election period and not being able to vote.

e-Voting: In all such scenarios, an online voting was proposed as a measure. In a paradigm shift to the voting process, the Bihar State Election Commission has decided to roll out an e-voting system using an Android-based mobile.[1] The State Election Commissioner of Bihar, Mr. Deepak Prasad, stated that the e-voting process would be executed via two mobile applications, one of them being developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing- ‘e-Voting SECBHR’ and the other by the State Election Commission.

The State Election Commissioner said so far 10,000 electorates have registered for e-voting and 50 thousand electorates will be able to exercise their right to vote via e-voting and without visiting polling booths.

Blockchain Voting: E-voting is still a familiar concept to the world, what marks the novelty is the Blockchain voting. West Virginia of the United States of America, becomes the first state in the world to have adopted this technique. It is crucial to note that, this concept is not at all new to India. The foundations have been started to lay down for the same. ‘Remote Voting Chain-PoC’ is remote voting system is Blockchain-based distributed system developed to enable migrants and other in-service voters posted at different locations to cast their votes from their place of work (Host Constituency) without commuting to their Parent constituencies, thereby saving time and money, and enabling higher voter turnout.[2]

The system enables secured storage of details of remote votes, ballots, and encrypted vote in the Blockchain. The returning officer of the parent Constituency only would be authorized to download all encrypted votes from the Blockchain on the day of counting and decrypt the same to count the votes.[3]

Such system would minimize the voter fraud, ensuring all the votes are counted and due to the nature of the blockchains, the same would be safely stored and transmitted to the desired channel.

India could set another example for the world, if we adopt such a blockchain voting and minimize the controversies that follow…

Glossary:

Blockchain: Blockchain is a shared, immutable digital ledger, enabling the recording of transactions and the tracking of assets within a business network and providing a single source of truth.[4] Blockchain operates as a decentralized distributed database, with data stored across multiple computers, making it resistant to tampering. Transactions are validated through a consensus mechanism, ensuring agreement across the network. 

---

[1] https://www.newsonair.gov.in/bihar-becomes-1st-state-to-launch-e-voting-system-for-urban-polls/

[2] https://blockchain.gov.in/Home/CaseStudy?CaseStudy=remotevotingchain

[3] https://blockchain.gov.in/Home/CaseStudy?CaseStudy=remotevotingchain

[4] https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/blockchain

Greetings, 

Dear Readers! 

“Your Legal-Tech Brew!” is a blog as cliché as any other blog…. It is an honest attempt towards compiling recent news in cyber-legal space, for the readers to understand right from the basic terminologies to analyzing existing legal framework across dimensions of cyberspace through various brief posts. 

The content of the blog is original work of the author, due credits have been given for the content referred from different sources. The blog is for information purpose only.)

*

(The blog and content therein including the figures, is an original work of the author, using the content without prior permission from the author is not encouraged.)