Blockchain related voting Tool: Romania Becomes first EU country To Use The Tech

By: Mark Jessy

December 23, 2020 2:17 PM

For the first time in Romania, the recent national parliamentary elections, which were held in November, used blockchain technology with the main purpose to guarantee the integrity of the electoral process and to strengthen its transparency. The government aimed to ensure tamper-proof and real-time data on voters’ presence.

There is still a way to go for the voters to be empowered to record, manage, count and check the votes themselves (without bypassing it to the electoral authorities) by allowing them to hold a copy of the voting record. However, the perspectives of fostering the development of a tech-enabled community consensus and of protecting the democratic values have been stated.

Blockchain technology has been adopted in various industries, where a chain of trust was needed for the flow of information, whereby any change brought to such flow was intended to be visible and marked. Elections proved to be a field where such technology would be of the utmost use in order to signal and prevent fraud, illegal voting (wrong person votes) or multiple voting by the same person or in more than one location.

The main value added resides in the fact that it clearly does not allow any alteration or amendment of the data recorded up to a certain moment, even by their administrators. It works similarly in other industries — it computes unique and unrepeatable data imprints, which are updated every five seconds. Any potential change in the information generates a new imprint, which further makes the respective change visible.

The information recorded was made available to the public through a specifically designated portal. For statistical purposes, this comes as another layer of trust to data and its sources, as well as the security of information.

Romania used a voting reporting tool, and the nation had numbers on voter turnout and additional statistics, which prove that applying blockchain technology in elections is possible.