• About & Contact Us
  • SEO Community

Ulancer.com

    • Latest Stories

      What is new?

    • Meet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in London

      September 27, 2018

    • Rally Rd., the app that lets you invest in classic cars, raises $7M Series A

      September 27, 2018

  • News
  • How to’s
  • Writing
  • Startups
  • Jobs
  • More
    • CMS Tools
    • APPS
    • Web Resources
      • Advertising
      • Firefox
      • Scripts
      • Tools

Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election

  • by Ulancer Contributor
  • In Startups
  • — 15 Mar, 2018

The citizens of Sierra Leone went to the polls on March 7 but this time something was different: the country recorded votes at 70% of the polling to the blockchain using a technology that is the first of its kind in actual practice.

The tech, created by Leonardo Gammar of Agora, anonymously stored votes in an immutable ledger, thereby offering instant access to the election results.

“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Gammar. “This is the first time a government election is using blockchain technology.”

“Sierra Leone wishes to create an environment of trust with the voters in a contentious election, especially looking at how the election will be publicly viewed post-election. By using blockchain as a means to immutably record ballots and results, the country hopes to create legitimacy around the election and reduce fall-out from opposition parties,” he said.

Why is this interesting? While this is little more than a proof of concept – it is not a complete voting record but instead captured a seemingly acceptable plurality of votes – it’s fascinating to see the technology be implemented in Sierra Leone, a country of about 7.4 million people. The goal ultimately is to reduce voting costs by cutting out paper ballots as well as reducing corruption in the voting process.

Gammar, for his part, sees the value of a decentralizes system.

“We’re the only company in the world that has built a fully-functional blockchain voting platform. Other electronic voting machines are ‘block boxes’ that have been increasingly shown to be vulnerable to security attacks. For that reason, many US states and foreign nations have been moving back to paper,” he said. “If you believe that most countries will use some form of digital voting 50 years from now, then blockchain is the only technology that has been created which can provide an end-to-end verifiable and fully-transparent voting solution for this future.”

One election in one country isn’t a movement – yet. However, Gammar and his team plan on expanding their product to other African countries and, eventually, to the rest of the world.

As for the election it is still unclear who won and there will be a run-off election on March 27. The winner will succeed President Ernest Bai Koroma who has run the country for a full decade.


News source

You might also like...

  • Safe Catch Tuna is a startup on a mission to eradicate the risk of mercury poisoning from your fish 5 Feb, 2018
  • With $10M in funding, Mabl brings machine learning to software testing 21 Feb, 2018
  • Robinhood rolls out zero-fee crypto trading as it hits 4M users 22 Feb, 2018
  • DoorDash raises $535M, now valued at $1.4B 1 Mar, 2018
  • Previous story LUS Brands, backed by Y Combinator, wants you to love your curls
  • Next story Airtable raises $52M to give non-coders tools to build complex software
  • RSS
    Receive Freebies & Latest Posts Directly To Your Email - it's Free!

    • Recent Posts
    • Most Popular
    • Comments
    • 7hrCggmJ-AMMeet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in LondonSeptember 27, 2018
    • oNo38LV2tQIRally Rd., the app that lets you invest in classic cars, raises $7M Series ASeptember 27, 2018
    • Nearby.gifBerkanan is a Bluetooth-powered group messaging appSeptember 27, 2018
    • 2122.pngVinay Gupta to talk about Mattereum at Disrupt BerlinSeptember 27, 2018
    • slider_wp_03Best collection of WordPress Slider PluginsJuly 5, 2010
    • Joomla template builderTop 8 Free Joomla Template GeneratorsJuly 19, 2011
    • 40+ Best WordPress Plugins for Comments40+ Best WordPress Plugins for CommentsJune 18, 2011
    • wptheme2A Collection of Free WordPress ThemesJuly 11, 2010
    • Jason Hall on:Circle launches its stablecoin
    • Jason Hall on:Circle launches its stablecoin
    • Bharat Sarkari Naukri on:Spotify acquires online music studio Soundtrap as it goes after creators
    • PMP on:Online learning platform Unacademy gets $21M Series C from Sequoia India, SAIF and Nexus
  • Staff Picks

    • slider_wp_03Best collection of WordPress Slider PluginsJuly 5, 2010
    • Joomla template builderTop 8 Free Joomla Template GeneratorsJuly 19, 2011
    • 40+ Best WordPress Plugins for Comments40+ Best WordPress Plugins for CommentsJune 18, 2011
  • Recent Posts

    • Meet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in London
    • Rally Rd., the app that lets you invest in classic cars, raises $7M Series A
  • Search Our Blog

  • Ulancer is an insightful freelance blog and resource site. We provide intuitive articles that cover Photoshop tutorials, time-saving management tips covering a broad range of topics. We also have an active freelance community forum, there you can meet other freelancers that share your common interest, socialize and chat about freelance trending news as the occurred.

© Copyright 2013 Ulancer.