This is a repost of a reddit post that I made earlier today.
In a few months on March 21, the Netherlands will hold an election where the citizens are allowed to vote for the people that will represent them in their local council. At the same time, there is a referendum where people can vote about the so-called "Sleepwet" which is a law that provides the secret intelligence services with more tools to monitor possible suspects. However, the current voting process for these kinds of elections and referenda is not without problems.
Before I dive deeper into these problems, let me first explain how we currently vote and how the votes are counted. Some time before the election day, all people eligible to vote receive a paper invitation at their home address. They have to bring this invitation to the polling station along with their ID card. In the polling station, a person inspects whether you are actually the person on the invitation and then he or she swaps the invitation for a paper ballot where you mark the candidate that receives your vote with a red pencil. After you have filled in the ballet, you deposit it in one of the containers. When the polling station closes, the containers are opened and the votes are counted by hand.
As you can imagine, counting the votes by hand is very inefficient and more importantly mistakes are made very easily. For example, in the previous national election, at least 14.000 votes were miscounted. In the past, computer voting and electronic counting have been used, but both methods had severe security issues, which forced the government to abandon these methods in favor of counting by hand.
The question remains how we could improve and modernize the current voting process that is both efficient and secure at the same time. I think that Horizon State might be the answer.
So what or who is Horizon State
Horizon State is a company that aims to increase the democratic process by providing a transparent, corrupt-free, and trustworthy voting and decision-making platform. With this platform, they want to tackle the problems of voter apathy and distrust. In addition, they want the voting process to be cheaper, efficient, and secure, so that costs are reduced dramatically and voting itself is easier to use as a tool.
Such platform is possible by utilizing the Ethereum blockchain where all the casted votes are stored. The blockchain is a public ledger that cannot be changed, is trustless, and can be inspected by everybody. This means that when you cast a vote to the blockchain that it will be recorded permanently and cannot be altered by anybody. The results are indisputable and allegations of fraud belong to the past.
To use the blockchain-based platform of Horizon State, you require Decision tokens (HST). These tokens operate as the "gas" on the platform and they are used to run the voting and decision-making processes. When someone votes, a portion of the HST tokens is used to cast the vote as a transaction to the Ethereum blockchain. If voting anonymity is required, then the voter association to his vote will be anonymised and hashed to ensure that people do not double vote. Once the vote has been casted, it is forever in the blockchain safe from everybody.
Finally, Horizon State is B2B focused meaning that it targets governments, large companies, local councils, and non-profit organizations instead of individuals. These organizations will actually buy the HST tokens to run a vote or unlock features on the Horizon State platform. If they are familiar with crypto then they can buy the tokens directly from any exchange or they can use the internal exchange and buy the tokens with fiat there.
If you want to read more technical information about the Horizon State platform and its token mechanics, please have a look at the whitepaper and this Medium post.
Has the time come to use Horizon State in the Netherlands?
As explained briefly, Horizon State will provide a secure platform were votes will not be miscounted or go missing. Nor will the votes be a subject of a hacking attempt as everything is safely stored in the blockchain. This will solve the major problems that the Netherlands currently have with their voting process. Further, using Horizontal State will drastically reduce the costs of election or referenda that we hold. Horizontal calculated that with their platform the costs are approximately 0.4 euro per vote and that is much lower than the currently 4.0 euro's per vote. That is a factor of 10 smaller!
Finally, I think that the usage of Horizon State in the Netherlands could increase the participation in the democratic process and bring back the trust in politics that some of the people have lost over the years. Holding elections or referenda will be much cheaper, efficient, and accessible with Horizon State. Therefore, I hope that the government from local to national level will use tools like referenda more often to collect and receive feedback from the population.
Anyway, at the moment this is not the case yet and we have to wait until the government takes the first move to modernize the voting process. Some days ago, I tweeted about Horizon State and I asked the question which organization in Netherlands will be the first one to use the Horizon State platform. One of the co-founders of Horizon State responded... ;-)
This does not mean that the government will start using it, but I guess at least one organization in the Netherlands will take the lead and hopefully many others will follow.
