The Brazilian government seeks to move popular petitions and the country's inefficient electoral system to Ethereum to process hundreds of millions of votes in the unchanging Blockchain network.
In Brazil, popular petitions allow more than 145 million voters across the country to reach consensus on important policy decisions. But for many decades political experts and analysts have questioned the problem of popular petition logistics and political commentators have described the structural problem of Brazil's electoral system as the basis for most of the country's political issues.
Gabriel Barbosa, a research associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, wrote: "When people are living from salary to salary, or as is commonly said in Brazil, 'selling lunch to buy dinner', the cost of political participation becomes high enough for people to be excluded from the political process, "emphasizing the lack of adequate institutions to deal with the cost of political engagement.
Go to Ethereum
As Joon Ian Wong of Quartz reported, Brazilian lawmakers, led by congressional advisor Ricardo Fernandes Paixão and university professor Everton Fraga, are planning ways to use the Ethereum Blockchain network to store and process electoral votes as part of an initiative greater to improve Brazil's political system, which The Economist described as "disastrous."
The key to employing a Blockchain system in the processing of petitions and election votes is to encrypt the votes in the immutable Blockchain network, as with transactions, to ensure that the specific data remains unalterable and invulnerable to manipulation.
Essentially, processing petition signatures on the Ethereum network would require smart contracts, and the system would function similarly to other decentralized applications that exist on the network. Brazil's electoral system would act as its own decentralized application with an independent digital token, which is used to process each vote in Blockchain.
Henrique Costa, a law professor at the University of Brasilia, told QZ that the lack of an unchanging platform to collect signatures had been a real problem for the government in the past.
Within the Brazilian electoral system, any popular petition with the signatures of one percent of the population of the country must be heard in Congress. But because of the lack of an institution and a platform that handles the votes of the petition, the group that meets for a specific petition also needs to find a legislator to adopt it.
Consequently, the likelihood of popular petitions being heard in Congress has diminished significantly, although many petitions have collected signatures of one percent of the electorate.