The “blockchain” concept on which cryptocurrencies operate might be extrapolated to various other areas of life, like voting systems, where it’s an accurate chain of decisions and evidence that could assure efficacy in a political or other election.

Writing in the International Journal of Web and Grid Services, a team from Lodz University of Technology, in Łódź, Poland, describes how it was the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, founded by an individual (or a group) under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, that unveiled the blockchain concept. The blockchain concept was invented to be utilized to give value to a cryptocurrency, but its description explains that it might be applied in other areas fairly as well:

A blockchain is basically an open and distributed ledger, an expanding list of records (blocks) that are connected sequentially and encrypted. Each block involves a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. The nature of a blockchain indicates that early entries cannot be altered without all users viewing the modification, which makes it tamperproof.

Aneta Poniszewska-Marańda, Michał Pawlak, and Jakub Guziur of the Institute of Information Technology at LUT demonstrate that current electronic voting systems have their advantages and disadvantages. Nevertheless, a general problem with all of the approaches utilized so far is that they experience inadequate auditability and transparency. There are four principal approaches to electronic voting—dedicated voting machines, voting with electronic ballot printers, voting with optical scanning voting machines and voting through the internet. Each has benefits and drawbacks. Furthermore, the field is very fragmented by various technology and solutions to each of those four main methods.

This, the team recommends, is where blockchain would come into its own. Blockchain could underpin a current approach to electronic voting yet add the necessary ability to control the process and make it auditable to prevent fraud. Not only might the blockchain approach be utilized in order to avoid fraud, but it also opens up the voting system to independent inspection exceeding those holding the ballot, whether company board, government, or other organization. It opens it up to being inspected and audited without jeopardizing voter anonymity or the integrity of the result.

The team acknowledges that there are restrictions to even the blockchain approach at the moment in that voter anonymity might be negotiated to a confined degree by the vicinity of given blocks in the system. Nevertheless, they recommend this will be attainable with additional research.