Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election
“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.The details on this vote have been extremely scarce. The use of the future tense to describe access is worrying."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.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?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.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.