No more contested elections

Blockchain voting applications specifically address one of the most difficult factors challenging electoral integrity – the trust model. Blockchain ensures trust is distributed among a set of mutually distrustful parties, all of whom are potentially adversarial, that participate in jointly managing and maintaining the cryptographically secure digital trail of the election. By distributing trust in this way, blockchains create a trustless environment whereby the amount of trust required from those participating in an election is minimized. Blockchain voting allows for every participant in the network to verify every transaction written to the digital audit trail. This is advantageous in online voting systems as it means end-to-end verification of the election happens on a rolling, ongoing basis during the election process itself. 

While the use of blockchain in voting allows for ongoing verification of an in-process election, it also allows for a retrospective end-to-end verification of all election activities after the election has finished. Elections administered using Votem’s blockchain voting system could be recreated in context and verified indefinitely after the end of the election by validating the results and all signed vote transactions. Furthermore, blockchain voting means that every action that transpires, verified in real-time by the entirety of the network, is immutable once the transaction that represents that action is written to the blockchain. Every action by a voter is fully visible to the voter and to every node at any time, maximizing visibility into an ongoing election without sacrificing the voter’s anonymity. Imagine if every stakeholder in an election – every candidate, political party, the media, election observers, auditors, and the general public – could validate every vote in real-time. That’s what the CastIron platform brings to voting events.