Written by Kris Bajada

While the subject of online voting is being discussed, the students of Junior College will once again have the opportunity to vote for or against its introduction, as the person who represents non-politically oriented students, I believe I can give an unbiased view on this topic.

In order to determine whether online voting is advantageous or disadvantageous for the Junior College, students must analyse it logically.

1. No student card needed to vote

The greatest advantage that online voting offers is that it circumvents the possibility that some students will be barred from voting due to damaged or lost student cards (a problem encountered in the last KSJC election). If this happens to a substantial number of students, it can call into question the legitimacy of the council elect.

2. No invalid votes and better access

Yet another crucial advantage online voting offers is that the possibility of invalid votes is eliminated. Additionally, it makes voting much easier regardless of the weather conditions; this results in a higher voter count as can be observed by the previous KSU election.

3. System could be hacked

On the other hand, one obvious disadvantage is that the system could be hacked, though the resources needed to pull such a thing off for a council which only has a one-year term means that it is very unlikely to happen yet this does not mean that it cannot take place altogether.

4. Potential for coerced votes

However, after much consideration, the greatest disadvantage online voting has is that voters do not have the security offered by a voting booth as candidates and members/runners can try to coerce other students at the time of voting.

At the end of the day, everyone is free to agree or disagree with online voting; however, a student should ultimately make an informed decision according to what they think is best, and not based on the whims of political organisations.

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• 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

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