Dear Editor,
If you’ve heard of Bitcoin, you know of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has started a revolution so great that it threatens the very existence of how our current system of government, finance and business is done. It aims to do away with paper money all together and banks can become obsolete. For the first time, the people can gain control over the forces that drive economic growth. This idea currently has big businesses and governments scrambling to find a way to control this revolution.
The technology that cryptocurrency runs on is called ‘Blockchain’ and it is the most secure system for monitoring and tracking transactions ever before seen in human history. Blockchain was created by an anonymous programmer that uses an alias called Santoshi Nakamoto.
It is a system of global ledgers that tracks a transaction using an encryption consisting of fifty-eight alphanumeric characters that is unique to that transaction, which is called a key. The transaction, such as a bank transfer, is tracked by this key and stored on multiple servers worldwide. These servers record the exact transaction and therefore it is virtually impossible to hack and steal this information because each server checks on the others to make sure there are no changes unless all of them agree. The only person that can make changes is the person whom the transaction belongs to and has a matching key for that transaction.
The beauty of blockchain is that it operates on an open source platform and is not controlled by a single entity, therefore, no single entity or person can manipulate the records of that transaction unless it has the ability to hack into a million computers at the same time, which is virtually impossible.
That is why blockchain technology is the answer to preventing election rigging by stopping voter fraud. The same concept that protects the transactions of cryptocurrency can also protect one person one vote in an election. And it will not be too expensive or difficult to implement. There are companies currently building voting platforms for electoral systems to operate on with the intention to change the democratic process worldwide.
The way it would work is, a voter would be recorded into the blockchain as an eligible voter and their information would then be stored with the same protection as mentioned above; the voter would then be issued a unique key and matching barcode to use for voting. At the time of voting, the voter would show up at the voting booth with that key and record their vote, after which that record is now stored on the blockchain. After voting is over, there will be no way to edit or delete any votes since it would be protected by millions of servers across the world. At this time, Gecom will only have to tabulate and share the results.
This system will also support voting from abroad and home with the use of any online device such as a phone or laptop, because each key cannot be replicated, therefore, it can only be recorded for that vote.
Blockchain has handed its powers to the people and it is only the beginning.
Yours faithfully,
Malcolm Watkins
