Together with Top Universities and Concordium Blockchain, Greenland is investigating the possibilities for a blockchain-based election system in the country
AARHUS, Denmark and ZUG, Switzerland, 18 October 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Concordium Blockchain, COBRA, Aarhus The university, the Alexandra Institute and the IT University have been granted NOK 3.6 million by DIREC, to investigate how to create the best possible online voting system for Greenland.
Due to a change in the law in 2020, many Greenlanders will likely have to cast their vote online in upcoming national elections.
A group of researchers from Concordium Blockchain, Aarhus The university, the Alexandra Institute and the IT University will investigate whether a blockchain-based system will be a more reliable e-choice on the world’s largest island.
DIREC, a collaboration between the computer science departments of eight Danish universities and the Alexandra Institute, has just awarded the group NOK 3.6 million for the ambitious project of privacy-preserving and software-independent voting protocols. Department of Social Affairs, Labor Market and Home Affairs by Greenland will work closely with the group on that.
“There are, of course, many advantages to an online choice, but mistrust and a lack of regulatory-ready and secure solutions have prevented the vast majority of countries from moving forward. From Concordium, a science-based decentralized blockchain with protocol-level ID, we are eager to participate and solve the potential problems of building online choices in our chain Greenlandwhere huge distances make it difficult for people to cast their vote, an online solution could potentially increase voter participation, and this is one of the reasons why a law change in 2020 paved the way for the Greenlandic government to give Greenlanders the opportunity to cast their vote on net in the future, says Kåre Kjelstrøm, CTO at Concordium.
“My goal is that we can give the Greenlandic decision-makers good conditions for deciding which system to use to hold online elections. In terms of research, the project can also be valuable. Technologically, we are moving into unknown territory. and depending on our results, you can easily imagine that the many, many countries that can see the benefits of an election will also be able to use our results. And finally, Greenland – with its limited population and large distances – is an optimal place to start from, says professor at the IT University, Carsten Schürmann, who is the principal investigator on the project.
Is blockchain the solution?
Bas Spitters, associate professor at Aarhus University and researcher at the Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus, which is internationally recognized for its research related to the verification of blockchain technologies, sees great potential in the project:
“Electronic election protocols use a kind of bulletin board, and Blockchains can be used as a private and secure bulletin board. They are already used in minor elections to ensure that voters can check that their votes are correctly registered. In this project, we will investigate whether it can also be used in major elections. In particular, we aim to verify that the protocols used to verify the votes are inaccessible to outsiders and that they are secure. In addition, in cooperation with Concordium, we must investigate whether by integrating MitID into their blockchain, it will be possible to give voters the opportunity to identify themselves while their private information is protected”, concludes Bas Spitters.
Carsten Schürmann, who many consider one of the world’s leading experts on election technology, has previously been critical of the internet. However, he is convinced that online voting will become widespread in the coming years, and recognizes the importance of creating a reliable system for it, for which this project can create the best possible conditions.
“Blockchains offer some relatively new opportunities to create security and increase transparency, which can be very interesting when we talk about internet elections. With this project, we will concretely investigate how blockchain technologies can be used to mitigate attacks on the electoral process, detect technical and human errors and take care of the secrecy of the vote.We will do this by developing some protocols for a system that can be verified and which is what we call software-independent, says Carsten Schürmann.
CONSULT:
Concordium
Maria Amalia Rojas
Marketing Director
[email protected]
The following files are available for download:
SOURCE Concordium
