Blockchain Technologies Corp. (BTC), a New York-based blockchain and cryptocurrency software technology company and startup accelerator, has revealed that it is working on its tamper resistant blockchain voting machine – “VoteWatcher”.
A voting machine has to be perfect in two aspects – correctly capturing the voter’s intent and ensuring that the vote is being correctly counted. The new VoteWatcher blockchain voting solution uses paper ballots first, which are scanned and uploaded to the blockchain for safe keeping. According to the company, there is no other way to fully ensure a secure election.
“What happens when non technical people want to audit an election conducted using paperless electronic voting machines?” asks Nick Spanos, CEO of Blockchain Technologies Corp. “All you can audit is the code the machine used to calculate the results. There is no original record of the votes cast. Paper ballots are the only way to do a real re-count for the general public.”
Blockchain Technologies Corp. says that paper ballots are the foundation of its VoteWatcher sytem. Ballots are fed through a scanner which records voters’ choices. As each ballot is scanned, the data, including a ‘hash’ of the ballot’s image, is uploaded to the blockchain and nobody is able to manipulate the results.
Blockchain Technologies Corp. recently conducted elections at the Libertarian Party state conventions in Texas and New York. The company has a patent pending on blockchain voting systems.
