Blockchain Firms to Create New Voting System
The Waves platform will be participating in the creation of a new form of blockchain-based voting system, characterized as “liquid democracy.”
The liquid democracy project is a collaboration between a number of different organizations and research groups, including the Blockchain Institute, Ergo, and cryptography and cyber-security researchers Bingsheng Zhang and Hong-Sheng Zhou.
The group said existing electoral systems, although based on democratic models, have significant limitations. Representative democracy, for example, requires voters to give up their rights to a proxy, who wields influence on their behalf. Direct democracy, while ostensibly fairer, tends not to scale well for a number of reasons – including its requirement that voters are well-informed about every issue on which they make a decisions.
The group’s liquid democracy e-voting system brings together both delegation and voting, via the new concept of statement voting.
Statement voting can be viewed as a natural extension of traditional candidate voting. Instead of defining a fixed election candidate, each voter can define a statement in his or her ballot but leave the vote “undefined” during the voting phase. During the tally phase, the (conditional) actions expressed in the statement will be carried out to determine the final vote, according to the release.
The group said that their statement voting can be extended to enable more complex voting and generic ledger-based non-interactive multi-party computation. They believe that the statement voting concept opens a door for constructing a new class of e-voting schemes.
“Fair, efficient, transparent but anonymous voting systems are a clear use-case for blockchain technology,” said Waves CEO Alexander Ivanov.
