E-Voting and blockchain: Calabria, a land of technological innovation

Saturday 18 August, the town of Polistena became a theatre of technological innovation thanks to the event "Digital Generations, Computer Participation and Blockchain", organized by the municipal administration in partnership with Internet & Idee.

The debate, carried out by the I&I team, illustrated the potential offered by a highly innovative electronic platform based on blockchain. This type of architecture, which many define the new generation of Internet, is based on a concatenated system of blocks, each of which contains a digital archive of information shared by each node of the system.

A platform based on blockchain lends itself to different uses, above all the management of monetary transactions based on bitcoins and cryptocurrencies. In this regard, the I&I team showed its potential in the consultation and certification of official documents, such as electronic voting.

Thanks to this data management mechanism, it has been illustrated how the platform can guarantee the integrity and transparency of the vote, as well as the anonymity of the voter. By making a parallel between the real and the digital world, it can be said that the nodes are like polling stations, each of which has the exact copy of all the ballot papers of the entire network. This ensures the complete transparency of information and election results, which are recorded in digital archives shared by all and it is not subject to the control of a central authority, as can be the state.

One of the biggest strengths of this platform, however, is the security against fraud. Information, and in this case the ballot papers, cannot be boycotted and altered, because, if you try to tamper with a paper, the result of that single seat would be invalidated by the verification of the other seats that have a different vote.

The use of blockchain in the electoral sphere can only open the door to a new frontier of democracy. A digital revolution that will guarantee the total security of information and electronic voting, giving everyone the opportunity to verify the validity of the results and of the entire electoral "chain".