Once more , two days ago , PM Shri Modi had strongly
urged all political parties to reach a consensus in respect of holding
simultaneous elections for Lok Sabha and all the State Assemblies
Shri Modi added that besides saving money and manpower, holding state and Lok Sabha polls simultaneously would save time and not come in the way of taking important decisions, which the government cannot do once the model code of conduct comes into effect.
Modi said Rs 1,100 crore was spent in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and this expense went up to Rs 4,000 crore in 2014. This expenditure excluded the money spent by candidates and political parties.
I am a strong
supporter of this idea and my thoughts on the subject of Electoral Reforms are
summarized at :
But I never imagined that the following
Mobile
App which I had suggested some 5 years ago for facilitating simultaneous polls , would find a
perfect technological solution in BLOCKCHAIN !
VotesApp /
I have been hearing ( but , not
understanding ) about BLOCKCHAIN
for past one year, in the context of its application for mining / trading in
Crypto-Currency – which to me, appears something very sinister !
Now comes the news that BLOCKCHAIN technology can
vastly facilitate MOBILE-BASED VOTING !
If so, EC ( Election Commission ) should ,
·
develop VotesApp by end of Feb 2018
·
give a demo to
political parties in March
2018
·
conduct a parallel run ( along with EVM-VVPAT ) for Karnataka State
Election in May 2018
·
Publish the
results of both methods in June
2018
Those who
have any doubts re suitability of BLOCKCHAIN technology in voting , may want to
refer to :
When designing a new voting system, a core tenet would be to
remove all need for “trust,” and place strong emphasis on open verification of the process
and the votes. A similar problem was addressed with digital currency
such as Bitcoin and Etherium.
On the blockchain, each group of
transactions is hashed together, along with a hash of the previous block, and
the entire blockchain would be publicly accessible.
Using a blockchain for digital voting could
record both voter and
candidate ID, as well as the time. The voter IDs are a public / private
key pair, not traceable to a voter’s identity.
Another application for blockchain technology is voting.
By casting
votes as transactions, we can create a blockchain which keeps track of
the tallies of the votes.
This way, everyone can agree on the final count because they can count the votes
themselves, and because of the blockchain audit trail, they can verify that no votes were changed or
removed, and no illegitimate votes were added.
Among the
startups that followed in an attempt to build upon the Blockchain to create a
secure voting system was a Virginia-based company called FollowMyVote.
There is a
common misconception that voting cannot be done online in a secure way.
Security of digital voting is always the
biggest concern when considering to implement a digital voting system.
With such monumental decisions at stake,
there can be no doubt about the system’s ability to secure data and defend
against potential attacks.
One way the security issues can be potentially solved is through
the technology of blockchains.
23 Jan
2018
www.hemenparekh.in / blogs
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