Today, in my country, we had general elections. The electoral position that has all the news is that of the presidential position.

Election exercise in my country has received a lot of stick from her citizens and outsiders too. The critics say that the elections are not free and fair.
I wouldn't want to speak bad about my country, but, those criticisms are very true.

Election exercise in my country is filled with, violence and all manner of evil. Sometimes, there is loss of lives and properties. Aside from that, there's a high level of stress in carrying out the voting exercise.
This has been a constant thing in the general elections every election year.

How can this menace stop?
How can we have an election void of cheating and manipulations?

That's the question we ask every election year.

Technology evolution has brought an answer.

The way to solve all these problems is by using blockchain technology.

A lot of intelligent youths have suggested this(the blockchain) as the solution to 95% of our election crisis.
But, those suggestions fell on deaf ears.

There are two major reasons why blockchain tech won't be used as a voting tool in my country;

Technology Illiteracy.

My country is filled with people who aren't educated about even basic technologies. Using blockchain tech as a voting tool will mean those people will not be able to vote.
However, this issue can be solved. If the electoral committee educates the populace on how to use the tech, this problem will be solved.

Corrupt leaders.

The leaders in my country pose a big threat to this medium of voting.
This is because they know with this medium, they won't be able to rig elections in their favor.

The second reason is the major reason why blockchain tech won't ever be used in my country as an election tool.

The benefits that would come from blockchain voting is huge.

Violence and stress-free elections
Almost Free and fair
A fast and efficient voting process
Live results etc

I wish to experience it one day in my country.

I apologize for bothering you with my country's problems.

This article is part of my "Steem Trek" series.

As my earlier write-up may have suggested, I will be discussing a project on Steem that has to do with voting.
That project is "Dpoll".

The series has seen me talk about other steem based projects. They are;

Steemit
Steemgigs
Dtrip
Steemwallet
Steemer
Steemplus
Steepshot

These are amazing projects, and you need to check them out.

Links to the articles I have written of these projects are available in the "Links" section below.

Here are the points I will be discussing in this article;

What is Dpoll.
Features of Dpoll.(How it works).
How decentralized polls would solve election problems in the world.
Summary.

Without further ado, let's talk about Dpoll.

What is Dpoll?

Dpoll is a project founded by Hive account@emrebeyler. From the project's name, Dpoll, I think it was formed from two words. Decentralized Polls

According to the project owner;

dpoll.xyz is an experimental application on the top of the STEEM blockchain. It has an account based voting system, where accounts may vote specific questions asked by other STEEM accounts.

According to him, polls are a great way to learn about the opinions and preferences of other people.
This was the reason he created Dpoll. He also stated that steem users might find other use cases on this project.
I just stated one use case in my introduction. That is; decentralized elections.
Maybe Dpoll or even the steem blockchain isn't best suited for that task, but, it is a pointer.

Features of Dpoll(How it works).

Dpoll is not like your regular steem dApp. Its features are very limited. But essential to what the project was built for.

In this section, I will be reviewing the features of Dpoll.

Post Editor (Creating a poll).

This is a common feature for every steem based app. The only things that might differ are how these editors are presented.

On Dpoll, the post editor is quite compact. It is like the editor you have on Steemit with little tweaks.

On Dpoll, instead of title, you have a question. It doesn't mean anything different really. When you view the post on other steem front-end, it is shown as the post title.

The post body is the description of the poll you are creating. This is to give more insight to prospective voters what you are trying to achieve with the polls.

There are markdown shortcuts on the text box which is great. It makes it easy for people who can't type markdown codes manually or are lazy, to input them with one click.

After the post body box, you have the "answers" slot.

In this box, you input the available options users can vote on.
By default, there are two answer slots. I think it was built by default for polls with yes or no responses.
You can decide to add more slots and answers. I don't think there is a limit to this, although I didn't try to find out.

The next box is where you input tags. This is an indispensable tool on any post editor in a steem based app.
The maximum tag is 5 tags. This is standard, but not the maximum it could be though.

In the next box, you select how long the poll would last. Currently, you can set it to last one week or one month.
This part I found displeasing. It would have been great for users to set this limit themselves. I'm not really a fan of apps or platforms imposing some things on a user.
I will make a suggestion to the project owner, and hear what he thinks about it.

The next box is the post-payout option. Again, this is a necessary component.

The last line is a checkbox. When checked, it allows a user to select multiple options you made available. When unchecked, a user can select only one option.

Here you have it. Everything about Dpoll's post editor.

It's quite different right?

After creating a poll, what's the next you do?

You check out for the results right? Great!

Check poll results.

To check out your poll results, you have to navigate to your profile page.
Yes, there's a profile page on Dpoll. Again, it is not like the regular profile page you know.
The profile page is somewhat empty, or I should say, relevant to the specific project.

On the user profile page, you find information on how many polls you have created and the number of polls you voted on.

To check the results of the poll you created, all you need to do is click on the post.

On the results page, you get to know how many people voted on your poll.
You see the percentage of voters on each option too.

What I liked about viewing the results is the presence of a filter.

This tool is susceptible to gaming, that's why the filter was created.

Some people can create new accounts just to sway the polls in their favor. This happens in real life elections.

This filter would work especially on occasions where the poll results matter a lot. Maybe a contest or something else that is quite serious.

You can decide to filter your results with these parameters;

Minimum Reputation
Minimum SP
Minimum account age (Days)
Minimum post count
Result layout

These filters are great, but, they can be gamed too. Except for the "Minimum account age (Days)" parameter.

For users who would want to cheat with a new account, I can simply set that parameter to suit only accounts that have been existing since the past month. That way, their votes won't count on the results sheet.

Sorting poll results with minimum reputation can be easily gamed. Thanks to the help of bidbots. New accounts can get up to 70 rep in one day.

Sorting by minimum SP can be cheated also. The user who is trying to cheat can fund a new account with a good amount of steem and power up.

Minimum post count can be maneuvered too.

Result layout really doesn't mean anything. It just how you want to view the result sheet. Either by account based voting or stake based voting.

While I like the filters, I feel it has a disadvantage. Especially that of minimum age.

While we can't rule out the fact that people will vote will fake new accounts, we can't also rule out the fact of genuine new accounts.
The same can be said for the other parameters too.

It would have been great if there was a way to balance the system to give everyone a chance and still make it rid of abusers. Sadly, I don't think there's any other way.

Another thing you can on Dpoll is to promote your poll.

If you are keen on getting reasonable attention on your poll, you can promote it. To get a spot on the homepage of the platform, you have to beat other bidders with your bid.
The currency for bidding is SBD. Why only SBD though?
What happened to Steem.
It would have been great to use either of both currencies to bid.

Dpoll's User Interface

Honestly, I forgot to talk about this while creating this article. I'm including this part after I had gotten to the summary part of the article.

By now, you would know it's absurd for me not to talk about UI.
Dpoll isn't packing an impressive UI. In Nigerian pidgin language, we'd say;

the UI get as e be. E just dey as e dey

Don't be scared, I will translate.

What I mean is that the UI is weird looking. It's just the way it is.
That is my description of Dpoll's UI.

Well, I don't blame the developer. According to him, Dpoll is an experimental application. So, we can assume this is an experimental UI.
The developer probably didn't think Dpoll could get any bigger than he planned. Well, it did.
According to stats on the homepage, Dpoll has over 4,000 users. For an app that was launched 5 months ago, that's good usage statistics.

We can expect a more exciting UI in the future though. But for now, the UI doesn't really hurt. So far you get your job done with the app.

How decentralized polls would solve election problems in the world.

Under this point, I thought I would share my own views on the subject matter "Elections".

However, I came across an article published by a Nigerian steemian who shares the same ideas as I do.

His article is titled;

How to achieve BLOCKCHAIN based election in Nigeria (transparency in an election)

So, he personalized it by saying Nigeria, but, those principles can be applied in any country. Especially those with election issues.

In his article, he explained how blockchain voting can be done using either of these 3 blockchains;

Ethereum blockchain.
EOS blockchain.
Tron.

Blockchain voting won't only make voting fair but very cheap. That is considering the amount of money that is spent on carrying out elections in my country.

You can read the full article here

After reading that article for the second time, I had afterthoughts about using blockchain tech, especially in my country.
It would be a hard thing to pull off. Someone also expressed the same thoughts in the comments section on that article.

So, maybe elections would be;

Transparent,
Violence-free, and
Cheaper.

It doesn't take away the fact that people can still be cajoled or bribed to vote for a candidate.
This is something even blockchain tech can't solve. It's a matter of conscience.

Summary

In this article, I have been able to review Dpoll and share some insight on related issues.

Dpoll, although being an experimental app, is great.

I tried out a test poll and I got feedbacks. Not so much though. But, I wasn't expecting any sort of feedback at all. So it's great to see that everyone has a chance of getting his/her polls voted on.
I think the question has to be really catchy though.

In this article, I have shared a use case of decentralized polls. Although, not with dpoll.

With Dpoll, you can conduct contests on the blockchain. You can also use it to decide the winners of your contest if you wish to get other people's opinions.

So here's my question;

What other cases do you think Dpoll can be used for?

Leave your answers in the comments section.

Thanks for reading!

Links

Project repository: https://github.com/emre/dpoll.xyz
Project's page: https://dpoll.xyz/

Resources:

Introducing dPoll - A poll app on the top of STEEM blockchain

No content was ripped off from the above source. But, it provided some useful information that I needed to created this article

The content of this post was created based on my knowledge of the project, and mostly from my experience. The images used are screenshots of the platform on my device. Other images gotten elsewhere have their source links provided just below them.

Series backlinks:

Github profile:

https://github.com/HarryHeights

Steem trek (My journey on Steem Part 8): Reviewing Dpoll; A poll app on the top of STEEM blockchain