During this year’s AGM for KSJC, the students voted against the online voting proposal which was put forward by SDM. After questioning students who were against the proposal, three issues could be easily highlighted.
- The transparency of the vote.
- The cost of maintaining the system.
- The legitimacy of the vote.
A potential solution to the issues brought up by the Junior College students is that of the blockchain.
Blockchain is defined as a decentralised ledger in which transactions are recorded and maintained in a permanent and tamper-proof manner. The blockchain is a distributable, permanent record of transactions, which in this case would be votes. The votes, being distributable permanent records, enables it to be irrefutably traced back to where it happened without revealing the voter’s identity. In addition, past votes cannot be changed, while the present can’t be hacked, because every transaction is verified.
One way of implementing this idea for Junior College and institutions alike is through the Ethereum platform. By using this platform users can deploy smart contracts, programs that enforce a contract by its code. Imagine them being a contract that both the user and the blockchain can sign together. The contract in this case being the vote submitted.
Both a website and a smart contract should be developed in creating this voting platform. Making the website only accessible to Junior College students solves the issue of the legitimacy of the vote.
From the website the student’s vote can be cast and sent directly to the smart contract where it will be almost immediately validated and counted. As mentioned before votes cannot be changed and the voter’s anonymity will be respected. This demands co-operation from the Junior College administration and council so that the whole program could be written from scratch. This could either be done by hiring a programmer that is literate in Solidity, which would be quite expensive as the whole technology is very young or students from the school could be encouraged to learn how to program in Solidity and use APIs like Web3.js Nonetheless a professional audit, whether written by students or outsourced, would still be required to make sure that the whole program would not have any compromises or any malicious code.
From a neutral point of view, one can only think of what a missed opportunity this was for Junior College students to not only break the status quo, but to also make a huge step in modernizing the voting system of such post-secondary institutions.
This would set a successful example on which these post-secondary institutions could model their voting system in the name of progression and modernity. A blockchain solution would resolve these issues by its nature; therefore, the above proposal would instill a new, more modern way of voting. This method would utilise the blockchain that would be directed to all scholastic elections, to the voter’s comfort and advantage.
Written by Aiden Williams & Aidan De Carlo
Image Credit: LuckyStep48