West Virginia will become to first American state to implement online voting with blockchain, to allow soldiers overseas to vote.
Blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) have gained huge popularity in the last few months. Because of their effectiveness and security, they have been proposed for a great variety of applications. An important one is online voting.
West Virginia will now become the first state to bring this application of blockchain and cryptocurrencies into reality. It will be used in their upcoming primary election on the 8th of May.
Voatz, a Boston-based start-up, is developing a solution to allow deployed military members to submit their vote using their mobile phones from anywhere in the world. Blockchain technology will guarantee that each vote is securely encrypted and stored.
They could even use cryptocurrency tokens to achieve this. For example, Decision Token is a lesser-known ERC20 token that will use its tokens to create an online voting platform. West Virginia could use the token to conduct their vote.
This project is the first of its kind in the US and, despite its still limited scope, has the potential to change the way in which we select our representatives. A public ledger could provide immediate counting of the ballots that could be audited by anyone, as well as a simple option to vote for all those that cannot do so in person.
Furthermore, this would make voting accessible to anyone, and it is a huge use-case for cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies could even be used in our voting systems in the future!
The possibilities of blockchain technology seem to be endless, and perhaps the political leaders of the near future will be elected using an efficient trustless ledger like the one developed by Voatz, possibly even using ERC20 Ethereum-based tokens developed for this purpose.