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A voting screen on a smartphone
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Expected to guarantee greater transparency and security
The era of online voting is expected to arrive next year. This will enable citizens to vote by pressing a button on their smartphone screen, without having to go all the way to the polling place. On Nov. 28, South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Election Commission (NEC) announced that they’re planning to develop a system of online voting based on blockchain technology by December and launch a trial service next year. Their plan is to apply the system on a trial basis to voting and surveys in the private sector as a way of identifying any potential errors or shortcomings. “A blockchain-based online voting system is characterized by much greater transparency and security, which are achieved by applying blockchain technology to the entire process, from authenticating voters to saving and verifying the voting outcome,” the Ministry said. The Ministry and the NEC have been pursuing this project since the beginning of this year as one of six public sector trial projects that are a key part of the blockchain technology development strategy that was announced this past June. In 2013, the NEC developed an online voting system called K-Voting, which has been used in the primaries for party leaders and elections for apartment building representatives. As of the end of October, 5.64 million people had participated in 4,516 elections supported by this system. But distrust and allegations that the system could be hacked or exploited to rig elections caused paper elections to be frequently preferred, even though they require more man-hours than online elections. Significantly, the newly designed online voting system represents a switch from a centralized approach to a blockchain-based distributed approach to saving information related to casting and counting ballots. This basically makes it impossible to manipulate results through hacking or other attacks. And since stakeholders are given the authority to directly access the data saved on the blockchain, they can personally compare and verify the voting results, which are stored on a distributed basis. “Through this trial program, we hope to secure the anonymity and credibility of voting by managing the entire process of online voting on a blockchain. In the future, we’ll continue to expand support for the active use of blockchain technology in areas such as voting where mutual trust is the top priority,” said Kim Jeong-won, who handles internet convergence policy for the Ministry. By Kim Jae-seob, senior staff writer Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]
