Denunciations of election-related fraud abound in modern democracies. Other than attempts at manipulation for partisan ends, human error at tabulation centers is inherent in electoral fraud. Automating the voting system increasingly comes down to the level of solutions; hence many solicitations of blockchain technology. So how could blockchain help to significantly reduce the margin of error at the election level?

American elections of 2020 as heralding fact

After the official results of the American poll, the Republican candidate Donald Trump still refuses to admit his defeat on grounds of electoral fraud. The camp of the Republican candidate denounces situations of massive fraud observed in the tabulation centers. These accusations relate to possibilities of non-counting of Republican votes and rigged postal votes.

These are still in the presumptive phase because none of them have found success in the local supreme courts of the various states. However, they are interesting insofar as they try to alarm us about the possible problems of electoral fraud.

Although objectively, according to a study by The Brennan Center for Justice, the rate of electoral fraud in the United States is less than 0.0009%. For postal voting, the rate is around 0.0025%. For now, the numbers are not bad in the United States when it comes to voter fraud.

However, a country with poorly qualified personnel and less technological facilities does not experience the same rate of fraud as does the united states or other developed countries. In Africa, cases of fraud related to the poor voting system are quite common, in addition to electoral violence and cronyism.

Challenges to the Traditional Electoral System

Elections are the foundation of the functioning of democracies. They are the tool par excellence that the people use to express their agreement or disagreement with the actions taken by these leaders during their assigned term of office. Agency theory presents a simplified framework of this mandate between elected officials and voters. The agency model shows us that if the contract established between the two parties is distorted at the base, the mandate is bound to fail.

Problems leading to a bad contract (voting) can result from the weakness of the institutions but also from a lack of technicality of the voting system. Fraud rates tend to rise in countries where corruption is high and institutions are controlled by oligarchies. They also increase when these countries are unable to modernize their voting systems. This leads us to the conclusion that institutions alone are not enough to prevent electoral fraud; technology must also play its part.

At the institutional level, the challenges of preventing electoral fraud are:

• Deprivation of the right to vote
• Bullying
• Misinformation
• Clientelism or vote-buying

The composition of an electorate can also be changed by disenfranchising certain categories of people, rendering them unable to vote. In some cases, states have enacted provisions that have created general barriers to voter registration, such as election taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and record-keeping requirements, which in practice have been applied against minority populations in a discriminatory manner.

Voter intimidation is the practice of putting undue pressure on a voter or group of voters to vote a certain way, or not at all. Postal voting and other forms of distance voting may be more vulnerable to some forms of intimidation because the voter does not enjoy the protection and privacy of the voting location. Intimidation can take many forms, including verbal, physical, or coercive.

People can spread false or misleading information in order to influence the outcome of an election. Another use of misinformation is to give voters incorrect information about the time or location of an election, causing them to miss their chance to vote.

Vote buying occurs when a political party or candidate seeks to buy a voter's vote in an upcoming election. Vote buying can take many forms, such as a monetary exchange, as well as an exchange of necessary goods or services.

At the technical level, traditional voting faces challenges of efficiency and accuracy:

• Misleading or confusing ballots
• Filling out ballots
• Vote registration errors
• Misuse of proxy votes
• Destruction or invalidation of ballots

Ballots can be used to discourage voting for a particular party or candidate by using design or other features that confuse voters into voting for a different candidate.

Ballot stuffing is an illegal practice whereby a person submits multiple ballots during a vote where only one ballot per person is allowed.

Votes may be misrecorded at the source, on a ballot or voting machine, or later in the misrecorded totals. Malawi's 2019 general election was annulled by the Constitutional Court in 2020 because many results were altered by the use of correction fluid and duplicate, unverified, and unsigned result forms.

Proxy voting is particularly vulnerable to voter fraud because of the degree of trust placed in the voter. In several countries, allegations were made regarding residents of retirement homes who were asked to fill out "absentee voter" forms.

One of the simplest methods of voter fraud involves destroying the ballots of a candidate or opposing party. While mass destruction of ballots can be difficult to carry out without attracting attention, in a very close election it may be possible to destroy a very small number of ballots without being detected, thereby altering the overall result.

Blockchain: An Instrument to improve voting integrity

Online voting based on block-chain technology is very attractive because of the accessibility and integrity it can bring to elections. The fundamental characteristics of the blockchain: immutability, accountability, and security determine the potential of this technology to securely maintain voter registration records and voter registration.

In such a system, voting data is captured in blocks that are time-stamped, encrypted, and "locked" to prevent tampering and unauthorized viewing. The use of Distributed Register Technology (DRT) means that information is not centralized, ensuring that all data is copied to nodes on the network.

Information cannot be lost and there are no central points for cyber attacks such as database deletion or denial of service attacks. The underlying peer-to-peer network provides a validation mechanism that protects the integrity of the locked data in each block.

To prevent voter fraud, a voting application can use multiple identification and authentication methods prior to voting. It has also been proven that digitizing voter registration and voting processes makes elections less costly and easier to organize.

Voting on the blockchain: A true democracy

Blockchain paves the way for direct democracy, where people can decide the direction of policy for themselves, rather than relying on representatives to do it for them. If the rules of a political election need to be changed to make way for such a transparent system, the Blockchain is also ideal for informing business decisions, guiding general meetings, polls, censuses, etc.

There are many and varied uses for chain voting software. Its ability to engage and manage a constituency is crucial for the future of society, not only to produce a transparent result, but also to encourage all people to participate in their community. Currently, the technology is still in its infancy, but it is maturing alongside the young voters it will one day help, and seems to be a key element of our collective future.