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Election integrity is critical to democratic societies; it is about a fair, transparent, and secure election process. Fake candidatures, or people registering as candidates (or misrepresenting that they’re eligible), are one of the persistent challenges in modern elections.
However, such systems traditionally use centralised authorities to verify candidates’ eligibility, and they are vulnerable to manipulation, fraud, and inefficiency.
Due to its built-in attributes of decentralisation, transparency, and immutability, blockchain technology can be a powerful solution to these problems.
By combining blockchain and smart contracts, election authorities can automate and secure the candidate registration process and prevent fake candidatures to ensure only qualified persons run for votes.
This exploration examines the use case of how blockchain and smart contracts can enable candidates to be registered, vetted, and authenticated, and ultimately improve electoral processes in the integrity sense.
The Fake Candidacy Problem
A ‘fake candidacy’ occurs when an individual applies to run for political office while providing false information or appearing to have ‘fake’ qualifications. This can happen in a variety of ways:
- Impersonation: An impersonation by another candidate—using forged documents or stolen personal details—is possible.
- Ineligible Candidates: The first means is for people who are not legally or constitutionally allowed to run for office to play with the system to get themselves on the ballot.
- Fake Documents: There is no dearth of candidates who can register but, in most cases, have fake educational certificates, residence proofs, and other credentials necessary for registration.
- Election Fraud: In some cases, political parties may ‘introduce’ candidates to manipulate elections so as not to violate quota systems.
The consequences can be devastating to the electoral process, and they can dilute the legitimacy of elections, cause voter loss of faith, and contribute to political instability.
Due to corruption, errors, and lack of technological infrastructure, current registration systems for candidates, usually administered by centralised authorities like electoral commissions, political parties, or government, are vulnerable in areas with weak governance.
The fact that blockchain can offer secure, transparent, and tamper-resistant records makes it a credible option to beat fake candidatures and improve election integrity.
Blockchain Technology: A Primer
These are the basic things to understand what blockchain is and how it works before we jump straight to how blockchain is going to solve our problem of fake candidatures.
A blockchain is a distributed, decentralised, public ledger of transactions, maintained by multiple nodes called peers or wallets, thereby securing, validating, and extending the block and the ledger.
It is a network of computers (nodes), working in a peer-to-peer mode, in which a new transaction or data entry (block) is linked in a cryptographic way to the previous one, creating an immutable chain.
Key features of blockchain include:
1. Decentralisation: Unlike the traditional system where data is held together by how a central entity or power operates, blockchain is devoid of central governing control. It makes sure that no one can have a monopoly over the data.
2. Immutability: Once information gets added to the blockchain, it cannot be modified or erased. This feature makes data tamper-free and trustworthy.
3. Transparency: Each transaction is visible to all other participants of the network. This feature prevents any kind of information manipulation or alteration.
4. Security: Blockchain provides cryptographic security features to secure the data so that the data is accessible and can be changed only by the authorised user.
As a result of these characteristics, blockchain is an ideal candidate for use in election systems—where transparency, security, and immutability are critical.
Preventing Fake Candidatures with the Help of Smart Contracts
A smart contract is a contract where the terms of that agreement are externally defined but stored in code. They run and enforce the contract terms automatically and without the need for intermediaries or third parties when a set of conditions is met.
For the case of elections, for example, smart contracts can be utilised to automatically automate such things as automatic registration of candidates to run for office, so that only eligible candidates get to run.
Here are several ways smart contracts can be applied to registration:
1. Automated Eligibility Verification: The eligibility of candidates can be verified by smart contracts based on pre-defined rules of legal requirements (e.g., age, residency, educational qualifications, and others).
For example, a smart contract could instruct someone whether a candidate was of the right age or had met the necessary residency requirements before permitting them to go further with the registration procedure. These rules are enforced automatically in the contract, with virtually zero risk of fraud or human-made errors.
2. Decentralised Candidate Database: Creating such a registry that contains each candidate’s identity and qualification as immutable records on a blockchain.
This way, smart contracts can guarantee that once a candidate’s credentials are verified and recorded, they cannot be changed. It makes it impossible to fraudulently change or add information after registration.
3. Verification of Documents: They often ask candidates to present some documents, including proof of citizenship, education certificates, and so on.
Blockchain provides secure storage and a link to the document to a candidate’s profile. After that, when the candidate wants to register, the smart contract will first check if these documents are legitimate and if they meet the important criteria.
4. Transparent and Auditable Process: All the candidate registration activities are as transparent and public as blockchain is. Each action, such as when a candidate submits their application or when a doc is verified, could be logged by a smart contract.
This transparency guarantees that anyone would notice immediately when someone tampers with or manipulates the process, which should drive greater public trust in the election process.
5. Prevention of Duplicate Registrations: By using a decentralised blockchain system, each candidate is assigned a unique identifier that is linked to their verified identity.
Smart contracts can ensure that a candidate cannot register under multiple identities or appear on the ballot more than once. The system can cross-reference the candidate’s information against existing records to prevent duplicate registrations.
6. Real-Time Status Updates: With smart contracts, election officials, candidates, and the public can receive real-time updates on the status of candidate registrations.
For example, candidates could be notified immediately when their application is received, verified, or rejected. This streamlines the registration process and provides transparency for all involved.
How the Candidate Registration Process Could Work on Blockchain
To better understand how blockchain and smart contracts can prevent fake candidatures, let’s walk through a hypothetical candidate registration process using these technologies.
- Candidate Profile Creation:
- A candidate initiates the registration process by creating a digital profile on the blockchain. The profile includes their details, such as name, address, date of birth, and other required information. This information is stored securely on the blockchain, ensuring it is immutable and transparent.
- Document Submission:
- The candidate submits various documents (e.g., proof of citizenship, educational certificates, etc.) as part of their registration. Using cryptographic encryption, these documents are uploaded to the blockchain, meaning they cannot be tampered with.
- Smart Contract Verification:
- To verify the submitted documents automatically, a smart contract is run. It matches that the candidate is following all rules, which are predefined legal eligibility. In this scenario, for example, the contract will check whether the candidate’s age is above the set limit or whether they have all the qualifications.
- Candidate Approval:
- Once the candidate passes through the eligibility checks, the smart contract approves their registration pretty automatically. The candidate adds their profile to the blockchain-decentralised registry of approved candidates.
- Public Transparency and Auditing:
- The blockchain then records all of the registration activity, which means candidates can be verified as being eligible and credentialed by election officials, political parties, and the public. They are easily able to detect if discrepancies or fraud attempts occur.
- Real-Time Updates:
- During the registration process, the candidate is advised while applying about their application status to keep it a hitch-free and transparent process. The status of candidate registration in real-time is also available for election officials and the public to view.
Why It Is Better to Use Blockchain and Smart Contracts for Candidate Registration
1. Enhanced Security: The security of signed smart contracts is checked through blockchain, as the decentralised nature of cryptography offers protection of candidate data from fraud, tampering, or any unauthorised access.
2. Transparency and Trust: Given blockchain’s transparency and immutability ledger, verifying candidate information in real-time goes a long way in building public trust in the electoral process. If someone attempted to manipulate candidate data, they would be detected immediately.
3. Efficiency and Automation: The verification process is fully automated using smart contracts, allowing there to be less need for manual intervention and speeding up the candidate registration process. This results in a more comprehensive and less time-consuming election procedure.
4. Prevention of Fraud and Fake Candidatures: The tamper-resistant nature of blockchain also makes it much harder for fake candidatures to appear. In an immutable record environment with automated eligibility checks, fraudulent attempts at registration are minimised.
5. Cost-Effectiveness: By reducing intermediaries, paper-based systems, and manual verification processes, blockchain will reduce the costs associated with candidate registration and election administration overall.
6. Global Applicability: Registration systems based on blockchain can be changed individually for different political systems as well as different jurisdictions, and therefore blockchain can be a generic solution for all the worldwide election authorities.
Challenges and Considerations
While blockchain and smart contracts offer significant benefits, there are also challenges to overcome:
1. Legal and Regulatory Framework: For the adoption of blockchain for candidate registration, new legal and regulatory frameworks have to be created that accept decentralised identities and smart contracts as valid modes of verification.
2. Technical Barriers: Deploying blockchain-based systems requires massive amounts of technical expertise and infrastructure, and it is possible that such systems may not yet be accessible in regions that do not have the same access to technology.
3. Privacy Concerns: Despite being transparent, candidate information needs to be protected: there are reasons to keep the utility of a blockchain applied to hiring privately. These can be addressed by solutions like zero-knowledge proofs, where we verify candidate information without revealing one detail that one doesn’t want.
4. Public Acceptance: Blockchain is a relatively new technology, and there might be opposition from the public or political stakeholders not familiar with the potential of blockchain.
Conclusion
We propose to integrate blockchain and smart contracts into candidate registration to prevent fake candidatures and excitingly maintain election integrity.
Blockchain automates and secures the process of candidate eligibility verification, increasing transparency, subsequently reducing fraud, and reducing the entire process as a whole.
While it’s not going to be easy, the potential payoff of using blockchain technology in an election is clear: The possibilities of an even more transparent, secure, and trustworthy democratic system go far beyond our national borders.
Blockchain is bound to play an increasingly bigger part in securing the electoral process in a manner that lays the legitimate foundation for fairer elections.