The World’s first Presidential Elections ever audited on Blockchain happened in Sierra Leone
Blockchain technologies keep growing and proving to everyone that they are much more than just networks for cryptocurrencies. This week a new milestone in the evolution of this technology has been achieved thanks to the strategic alliance of Sierra Leone National Electoral Commission and Agora – a blockchain development company focused on the electoral sector.
The presidential elections that took place last week were carried out in a traditional way, the only difference being that as an initial test, at the western districts, Agora participated in these elections by invitation of the NEC, which accredited the Swiss company as an observer, according to Agora CEO Leonardo Gammar who explained in the official Telegram channel of the company. The executive disclosed the terms of the agreement:
“Agora’s team is involved in the Sierra Leone presidential elections, and we are in Freetown with our partner, the European Commission, helping the node operators of our blockchain (The Red Cross and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at the University of Freiburg) to audit today’s election results. We are proud to announce that our results in the western districts were ready two hours before the NEC and all NGOs, with 86% of the votes recorded.”
These would be the theoretically expected results, but so far no one has ventured to check them because of the strategic and delicate level of a presidential election.
The results obtained reveal the electoral behavior of the western districts and serve as support for a series of upgrades that could lead, in the very near future, to the complete migration towards a blockchain platform that allows a level of trust and efficiency which is impossible to guarantee in traditional systems (both electronic and paper-based).
According to the information provided in the White Paper, Agora takes its developer role in an area as important as the electoral one very seriously: They do not exercise any partisan approach, their product is designed to be politically transparent, and four layers of blockchain development ensure a voting process with unprecedented levels of quality:
“Agora has built a multi-layer architecture that is based on blockchain technology, which includes several innovations that have been developed by our team. Agora’s blockchain, called the Bulletin Board, is a distributed permission ledger based on the Skipchain architecture, which we have been developing since 2015. Data on our Bulletin Board is cryptographically tied to the Bitcoin blockchain through our Cotena layer, which provides a high level of immutability and decentralization of our data. The system we have architected provides high throughput capabilities and low overhead, which enables Agora to be run on low bandwidth devices.