Thailand’s Democrat Party Holds First Ever Election Vote with Blockchain Technology 🚨 This article is 6 years old...
Thailand’s Democrat Party Holds First Ever Election Vote with Blockchain Technology
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Updated: Apr. 9, 2020 at 6:43 pm UTC
Photo by Bharath Mohan on Unsplash
Thailand’s main opposition Democrat Party has become the first in the world to use blockchain technology in a live electronic voting system involving more than 120,000 voters for its primary election, Zcoin announced in a press release on Nov. 13.
Thailand Becomes a Leader in Blockchain Adoption
Despite a turbulent political atmosphere, the kingdom of Thailand has crossed a significant threshold when it comes to blockchain adoption.
Using a blockchain platform based on Zcoin, an open source cryptocurrency, members of the kingdom’s oldest political party, the Democrats, voted for their leader.
The voting took place both on voting stations, which were equipped with Raspberry Pi devices, and on a mobile voting app that required voters to submit their photo ID.
All data, including identification documents and voting tallies, was encrypted and stored on a decentralized and distributed file storage system, which was then stored on the Zcoin blockchain. The blockchain served as an immutable database and was used in order to provide auditability to the Thai Election Commission and Democrat Party candidates.
According to Computer Weekly, encryption keys were split using a cryptographic method called Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme, and voter identification documents could only be decrypted by a member of the Thai electoral commission or a representative of the Democrat Party for the purpose of verifying the eligibility of voters.
Zcoin Explores the Future of Voting
Zcoin is an open source, decentralized privacy coin that pioneered the use of the Zerocoin protocol which uses zero-knowledge proofs in its privacy scheme to break transactions links. Zcoin, which has been live since September 2016, is currently traded on exchanges such as Binance, Bittrex, and Huobi.
Speaking of the event, Poramin Insom, founder and lead developer of Zcoin, said that both the company has achieved a huge milestone in the country’s political history and that he hopes that more elections, both in Thailand and abroad, would look into blockchain technology.
The way this primary election was run will have significant implications for Thailand’s first national election, since the military coup in 2014, set to take place next year. Insom said:
“The unique circumstances of this election made Zcoin’s blockchain a good fit to record votes and sets the stage for future deployment of e-voting systems in the country,”
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Zcoin (XZC) is the first cryptocurrency to implement the Zerocoin protocol to ensure private transactions.