Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election
<i>“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Gammar.</i><p>The details on this vote have been extremely scarce. The use of the future tense to describe access is worrying.<p>"Blockchain Technology" has attracted scoundrels of every stripe. If Agora really cares about this as a test case, it needs to make the voting records public, and articles like this one need to make it clear how the reader can examine the results.<p>That said, I'm very skeptical about the utility of "Blockchain Technology" in voting. For one thing, what secures this block chain and makes fraud detectable?<p>In Bitcoin, the answer is crystal clear: Proof-of-Work coupled to an economic incentive. This system has well-known scope and limitations. We can reason, mathematically, about a multitude of attacks and outcomes.<p>Not so with the Agora system. And I'm afraid that journalists consistently refuse (or are not equipped) to ask the right questions - as in this article.