Elections require trust. Does your vote really count? How are votes counted? What is the error rate in this voting process? Do voting officials commit fraud? At this moment votes are mostly counted by hand and thus all these questions are valid concerns. With the recent developments in politics and foreign influences on elections, trust is at a new low. If elections could be immutable and trustless, this would be a huge win for democracy. Public blockchain fits the bill here.
Electis works on a blockchain based voting system at this very moment. Electis is a non-governmental organization based on the following principles: non profit, non commercial, and politically and philosophically neutral. One of their biggest pilot projects is the world-wide Cross-University Voting Project, build on Tezos.
"An open-source voting platform is being developed by a group of blockchain and e-voting experts and with the involvement of students. The goal is more than the development of another e-voting application: it is to prove the suitability of blockchain for secure e-voting in principle. It will be tested in cooperation with a network of universities worldwide to provide visibility, scientific scrutiny and bring safe e-voting to academic institutions all over the globe." - Electis
And this Thursday, the first testing round will take place. 23 universities are participating worldwide. You can follow Electis on twitter: @ElectisNGO
The following universities are participating in the project:
Polytechnique Paris - France
Strate University - France
Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University - France
Sorbonne Paris 1 - France
Assas Paris 2 - France
University of Edinburg - UK
King´s College London - UK
CODE University - Germany
Frankfurt School - Germany
Universität Freiburg - Germany
École Lolytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne - Switzerland
Tallin University of technology - Estonia
University of Georgia - Georgia
Mohammed 6 Polytechnique - Morocco
Polytechnique Tunis - Tunisia
New York University (NYU) - USA
Howard University - USA
Stanford University - USA
West Virginia University - USA
National Autonomous University of Mexico - Mexico
Ritsumeikan University - Japan
Indian Institute of Technology Madras - India
See for extensive information about Tezos: "An introduction to Tezos."
