Politics in africa is characterized by fraud, annullations, corruption and a lot of unwholesome practices. Africa is the home to many undemocratically elected presidents who has seized power over some twenty something years or even more. electroral processes are often seen as state controlled instrument of oppression and tools to ring themselves to power and also as an avenue to veto changes in the countries constitution with the help of these electroral bodies backed by corrupt judiciary and parliamentarians.
Nonetheless, BlockChain technology is proposing a new system of using its blockchain technology it as a means of ridding africa of the menance of political enslavement and embarrasment.
What is blockChain technology?
Blockchain Technology is a distributed ledger for doing financial transaction on the internet. it is a foundational technology that runs on decentralized nodes usually referred to as blocks connected by chains of previous transactions(nonce). it is also a list of continuous financial records linked by cryptographic signatures.the blocks are usual Unspent transaction output model which are arranged in piles and in cause of transaction must be agreed by all networks.
Some main facts about blockchain technology and why we need a decentralized election system in Africa
- Blockchain is very difficult to compromise.Unhackable(you must have access to 500 supercomputers to break into the system)
- The web stated decentralized(series of nodes where individual owns their own private servers and are responsible for distributing the information from the system)
- the internet made the web centralized during the dot.com bubbles
4.Data was collected and monetized
Why do we need a decentralized election system in Africa
1.Cost of elections sinks and shrink Africa's economy
2.Too much concentration of power by the incumbent government hence can easy ring political power for them selves
3.data accrued from election during voting are not used for statistical reference or to plan the next upcoming elections and information gathered are used against political opponents
- Data generated from electoral processes are reliable and accurate hence they can be used for census, empowerment and other incentives from Government and private Firms who will like to make use of the data
- In recent times data is valuable than labor, one has to be part of huge corporation to make money from data.
Our normal system runs on centralized system. the government usual have an election conducting body that correlates all the activities in electoral process. all authority is left in the hands of the electoral body who is controlled by the central authorities or house of assemblies.All the electoral body whether federal or state depends on the central power to send and receive information even as far as appointments
Disadvantages of the old system
-A single source of information
-Political motivated appointments of electoral officers
-Election are usual marred by Ringing and corruption to the fact that the central body has the final say in declaration of victors and losers
-Excessively expensive to conduct elections and money usually comes form the pockets of tax payers who are often disenfranchised to exercise their civic rights
-Annulament or manipulation of the election results by electoral body especially if the incumbent suffers defeat
The system will proposed for electoral processes in Africa
The system of our choice for electoral processes in Africa is a decentralized blockchain voting process. a system where no particular node or entity is telling another what to do or not do. we want a system that resides on multiple supercomputers around the world build on top of the blockchain technology. the system will work on multiple servers and will be able to hand failures gracefully. even if one system goes down the system will soon run.the integrity of the system is what makes it standard because all the nodes must be in agreement and usual trust an information after all the nodes have agreed on it.
Our system is open sourced so everything depends on the community and the trust of the users, hence election will be decided by who the mass have more trust and confidence on.
How will plan to achieve these model?
-We use the cryptocurrency way where a scarce resources is allocated on the network using a token.
-The token as act as the key to allow the user access to the network.
-The user can get a form of appreciation or reward by engaging in the electoral process
The proposed system will make use of a decentralized consensus . Lets look at the diagram explanation
-The system makes use of a shared ledger and uses a proof of work to show its integrity
-A distributed hash table to store data with history
-Smart contracts(crypto-economically secured)
-There is no central point of failure the system makes use of an IPFS stack a replacement for http,it consist of applications followed by Naming, Merkeledag, Excahnage, Routing, Network.
we can see the usage in applications like Git, bitTorrent, DHT and others.
The interesting part is that the system is independent of its creators because the system has a way of building autonomous software's. Artificial intelligence and block chain makes an autonomous software. we will make use of Distributed Autonomous Applications(DAPP) with human at the edge of it blockchain and artificial intelligence at both center of the Applications.
Our DAPP Election system will consist of
- Environmental settings
2.The Smart contract system - Interaction between the users and the system
4.Our web browser UIX interface
5.FAQ and Recommendations
6.Reward Pool
in our next article we will discuss the application in full.