Election Count: Is Blockchain Beating the Polls?

With election integrity under threat in the US and elsewhere, is blockchain technology part of the solution? Greenland is exploring voting options.

In October, Greenland reportedly explored the feasibility of an online voting platform for its national elections. Among the options being considered is a blockchain-based system.

That's not entirely surprising. Electronic voting, or electronic voting, has long been considered a promising use case for blockchain technology. "It's time to vote online," wrote Alex Tapscott in a New York Times opinion piece in 2018. "Using blockchain technology, online voting could boost voter participation and help restore trust of the public in the electoral process and democracy."

This seems particularly timely now that large swaths of the world's population are raising questions about the integrity of elections, particularly in the United States, but also in other countries, such as Brazil.

Tim Goggin, CEO of Horizon State, believes that blockchain-based elections represent a “significant improvement” over the way most elections are conducted today. Voting machines break down, software breaks down, and election irregularities often create uncertainty and doubt among voters.

With a public blockchain, by comparison, “it’s much easier for voters to trace their vote,” Goggin told Cointelegraph, “and audit an election themselves.”

Furthermore, if something untoward happens in the voting process, it's easier to identify it on a decentralized ledger with thousands of nodes than on today's tab systems "where counting is done at behind closed doors," says Goggin, whose company set up a public election for South Australia in 2019, the first time blockchain technology was used in the voting process for that Australian state.

Yet the potential of blockchain technology vis-à-vis public elections has been highlighted from time to time for some time now. No country has yet used blockchain technology in a national election.

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