First Decentralized Elections in Africa
By: Cyril Michino
Tags: Blockchain Application, Blockchain Development, Decentralized, Blockchain, Elections

First Decentralized Elections in Africa

Election illegitimacy has been a huge issues across many countries. Photo by roya ann miller

On Sunday, 15th April, 2018, African Blockchain Initiative made a significant stride in decentralizing African voting systems. For the first time in the continent, elections were run on the blockchain during the African Leadership Academy student government elections. This marked the beginning of what should be a wave of blockchain adoption in the voting/elections industry in the continent.

Public hashes used for elections. You could personally track your vote through your personal hash

Why Blockchain technology in elections?

The biggest promise of blockchain technology is trust, transparency and accountability. Unfortunately, Africa suffers most from deficiency of these three pillars of Blockchain. Most African countries have ended up in shambles and nullification of results after general elections. This is because of a lack of trust between the public and the electoral bodies which have more times than not been blamed for liaising with certain political parties to fix elections. While vote counting accounts for a huge percentage of elections nullification, online transmission of votes from polling stations to tallying centres has had a significant share of election fraudulence accusations.

One huge example is Kenya during the 2017 general elections: the Supreme Court had to nullify PRESIDENTIAL elections after accusations of hacking of the electoral commission servers (IEBC) during transmission of polling station results. This not only brought the country to a standstill for another two months, but also caused tensions between opposition supporters and government supporters which at times led to property destruction or loss of lives. In fact, till date, Kenyans are still pushing for the resignation of IEBC officials as there were accusations that some were involved in election fixing.

How does Blockchain solve election fraudulence?

In the decentralized ledger system (blockchain), there is no single point of failure. Data saved on the blockchain is stored in multiple ledgers meaning, if one was to hack the system, one would have to hack through the thousands of ledgers in the decentralized ecosystem — something that is virtually impossible. On top of that, blockchain’s cryptographic security further encrypts data such that only computers can run validations. This takes control off human beings who are more vulnerable to corruption and leaves validation and self-execution to computers which are less corruptible and run purely by the set code/instructions. It is this dual-layer of security, decentralization and cryptography that makes blockchain the perfect system for enhanced trust, transparency and accountability. Therefore, if the Kenyan elections (as cited above) were run on the blockchain, then hacking won’t have been an option for any party and computers rather than an untrustworthy electoral commission would self-execute the entire transmission and tallying processes.

Now, onto African Leadership Academy (ALA) Student Government elections

African Leadership Academy was the perfect launching point for African Blockchain Initiative’s dream of inspiring transparent voting systems. Since elections are done online in the school, African Blockchain Initiative focussed on changing the central servers into decentralized ledgers and even gave students the option to track their votes, which were encrypted into unique hashes (See image above of the voter tracking page and screen that was available to all). The decentralized system run on an Ethereum smart contract and even eliminated the administration rights that was given to the Electoral Council of the school. Initially, this council could know who voted for who but through the blockchain-based smart contract, all this data is encrypted and only results were made available after the elections. Indeed, we are talking about extreme transparency, equal rights throughout the voting ecosystem, and an unhackable election run through self-executing lines of code.

How will this be adopted in African national elections?

Adoption in National elections will be quite similar only that voters might vote from the convenience of their phones or laptops but through computer systems in polling stations. Alternatively, paper ballots could be used but after vote counting and approval by all observers, the tallies could be added to decentralized ledgers and a smart contract could self-execute the election results leaving no room for fraudulence during transmission of numbers from polling stations to tallying centres. African Blockchain Initiative hopes to inspire adoption of this decentralization particularly in countries still facing lack of electoral commission trust during elections — and there’s definitely a huge lot of them in the continent.

Wait, didn’t Sierra Leone run decentralized elections a month or two ago?

If Sierra Leone run their presidential elections on the blockchain, it would have been the first decentralized presidential elections worldwide. Unfortunately, despite the number of sources citing blockchain involvement in their elections, Sierra Leone government issued a statement denying the use of blockchain in the elections. “The NEC [National Electoral Commission] has not used and is not using blockchain technology in any part of the electoral process,” said Mohamed Conteh, the head of National Electoral Commission (John Biggs — TechCrunch).

NEC in Sierra Leone denies using blockchain in their national elections

This makes ALA elections the first of its kind in the African continent and definitely a huge stride to blockchain adoption in election systems in the continent. If a school in Johannesburg can do it, then a country with a million times the resources should be doing it too.

Learn more about Blockchain technology through the ABI blog: Stellar, Most Revolutionary Crypto 2018; Ripple, Revolutionizing Corporate Payments; What is Blockchain; Tron, Shaping Entertainment and Global Interactions

African Blockchain Initiative is now offering blockchain corporate workshops for corporations, read this articles to understand how ABI is shaping blockchain adoption in Africa through corporate workshops: Getting African Corporates on the Blockchain Leave a comment if you’d love ABI to run a workshop at your company, we will contact you.

Images are courtesy of TechCrunch, African Blockchain Initiative and Cryptotelegrafi