Simultaneous Polling
------------------------
Once more , two days ago , PM Shri Modi had strongly
urged all political parties to reach a consensus in respect of holding
simultaneous elections for Lok Sabha and all the State Assemblies
Shri Modi added that besides saving money and manpower, holding state and Lok Sabha polls simultaneously would save time and not come in the way of taking important decisions, which the government cannot do once the model code of conduct comes into effect.
Modi said Rs 1,100 crore was spent in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and this expense went up to Rs 4,000 crore in 2014. This expenditure excluded the money spent by candidates and political parties.
I am a strong supporter
of this idea and my thoughts on the subject of Electoral Reforms are summarized
at :
But I never imagined that the following Mobile App which I had suggested some 5 years ago for facilitating simultaneous polls , would find a
perfect technological solution in BLOCKCHAIN
!
I have been hearing ( but , not understanding ) about BLOCKCHAIN for past one year, in the context
of its application for mining / trading in Crypto-Currency – which to me,
appears something very sinister !
Now comes the news that BLOCKCHAIN
technology can vastly facilitate MOBILE-BASED
VOTING !
If so, EC ( Election Commission ) should ,
develop VotesApp by end of Feb
2018
give a demo to political parties in March 2018
conduct a parallel run ( along with EVM-VVPAT ) for
Karnataka State Election in May 2018
Publish the results of both methods in June 2018
Those who have any doubts re suitability of BLOCKCHAIN
technology in voting , may want to refer to :
When designing a new voting system,
a core tenet would be to remove all need for “trust,” and place strong emphasis
on open verification of the process and the
votes. A similar problem was addressed with digital currency such as
Bitcoin and Etherium.
On the blockchain, each group of transactions is hashed together, along
with a hash of the previous block, and the entire blockchain would be publicly accessible.
Using a blockchain for digital voting could record both voter and candidate ID, as well as the time. The
voter IDs are a public / private key pair, not traceable to a voter’s identity.
Another application for blockchain
technology is voting.
By casting votes as transactions, we can create a
blockchain which keeps track of the tallies of the votes.
This way, everyone can agree on the
final count because they can count
the votes themselves,
and because of the blockchain audit trail, they can verify that no votes were
changed or removed, and no illegitimate votes were added.
Among the startups that followed in
an attempt to build upon the Blockchain to create a secure voting system was a
Virginia-based company called FollowMyVote.
There is a common misconception that voting
cannot be done online in a secure way.
Security of digital voting is always the biggest concern when
considering to implement a digital voting system.
With such monumental decisions at stake, there can be no doubt about the
system’s ability to secure data and defend against potential attacks.
One way the security issues can be potentially solved
is through the technology of blockchains.
23 Jan 2018
www.hemenparekh.in / blogs
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