The incident of ballot burning last night in the USA election, while small, is yet another value add for the widespread deployment of Digital Signatures and Distributed Ledger electronic mobile voting.
At the last presidential election, discussion was ongoing about voting by mobile, indeed the discussion has been ongoing since at least the early 2000s. The advent of distributed ledgers, mobile devices capable of high levels of encryption and digital identities has now made that possible.
Additionally, value adds include enfranchisement of the young and elderly, reduction of the threat of polling stations violence and intimidation, reduction of resources required for elections from law enforcement that can be focused elsewhere and reduction of journeys to polling stations, increasing sustainability.
As all of these positive business case balances acrue to different stakeholders, the case is hard to argue, as is often the case for truly disruptive new processes. Leaving aside incumbent interests’ lobbying.
Now the elephant in the room that the public discourse has been driven towards is security, are mobile elections safe? That argument is a decade out of date now, since the advent of distributed lesdgers. A well structured governance can now be created, as I was instrumental in at the European Union, that digitally replays constitutional governance, to ensure, without margin for discussion, that voting is fair.
Voting by mobile device is something I have been advocating for at least eight years, check my post.
Ultimately however, we may have to wait a generation for public confidence in technology to allow for this jump to distributed, electronic voting.
Image Credit: VOAnews.com