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The Thai Democratic Party, the country's main opposition party, has become the first major political party in the world to conduct primary elections entirely on a blockchain.
Using a live e-voting system based on Zcoin's blockchain, the party successfully led its primaries involving over 120,000 voters between November 1 and November 9. In an election of primates, also marked the first time that an important Thai politician The party has selected its leader using the contribution of the generality of the members of the party in view of the first general elections of the country by the military coup of the 2014.
Influence of IPFS and Zcoin in Thailand
A few days ago, CCN reported that a Thai rap music video rap "Rap Against Dictatorship", which turned into a viral sensation with over 30 million views in two weeks, became the first known piece of political resistance music to be archived using a blockchain following government censorship threats against YouTube video. Using IPFS, a decentralized file storage system, an unknown user saved a copy of "Rap Against Dictatorship" in a Zcoin blockchain transaction that is based on the Zerocoin protocol.
The Thai Democrats party has taken this concept forward, using IPFS to revolutionize the process of maintaining the integrity of electoral registers. Voters were able to take part in the process using a mobile voting app that required sending a photo ID or manual voting to physical voting stations operating on a Raspberry system Pi.
The IPFS was then used to store packets of encrypted data containing identification documents and electoral findings. The hashes were then archived on the blockchain of Zcoin, guaranteeing their immutability and verifiability both to the candidates of the Thai electoral commission and to those of the democratic party.
Speaking of the Democratic Party elections, Poramin Insom, Founder and Lead Developer of Zcoin said:
"I am very proud that Zcoin played a role in making Thailand's first large-scale electronic vote, a reality that saw greater voter participation and transparency. […] I believe we have reached a milestone in the political history of our country and we hope that other political parties or even the government not only in Thailand, but in the region, can use blockchain technology to allow electronic voting or large-scale polling ".
While previously a small group of about 250 deputies and party presidents would have chosen the party leader who would have been the presidential candidate, the use of blockchain technology has allowed more than 120,000 party members nationwide to take the decision for the first time.
Key operational details
In a sharply contested competition with potentially huge implications for the country ahead of next year's elections, former Thai premier Abhisit Vejjajiva defeated his closest challenger Warong Dechgitvigrom, earning 67,505 votes against Warong's 60,889. Before the elections, Vejjajiva had spoken of the importance of opening up the democratic process of Thailand and the success of the blockchain deployment would probably have a significant impact on the broad electoral framework of Thailand and other countries with similar circumstances throughout the world.
The information from the Democratic Party reveals that the cryptographic keys used in the voting process were divided using a cryptographic method called Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme, which ensures that consent is needed to decrypt the entire data set of voting. Election identification documents could be deciphered only by an accredited official of the Thai electoral commission or a representative of the Democratic Party in order to verify electoral eligibility.
The most significant fact is that the voting data can only be deciphered with the full consent of the five parties concerned, ie three representatives of each candidate, the Thai Electoral Commission and the Democratic Party.
The voting activity covering the voting period November 1-9 can be observed on the Zchain blockchain explorer here.
Shutterstock foreground image.
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