Blockchain Revolution

ALTERNATIVE MODELS OF POLITICS AND JUSTICE

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If the blockchain could enable a more efficient, responsive government and improve
how democracy is administered through new voting procedures, could it also catalyze
new political processes as well?
For some supporters of next-generation government, the ultimate aim of electoral
reform is to enable a system of “liquid democracy.” Eduardo Robles Elvira, CTO of
Agora Voting, is one such fan. He describes liquid democracy as combining the best
parts of direct democracy (like the sort practiced in ancient Athens) with today’s
representative democracies, which ask very little of their electorates.
Liquid democracy, also called delegative democracy, allows citizens the ultimate
in customization and personalization of the democratic experience. In Robles Elvira’s
words, in a liquid democracy “you can choose your level of participation at any point
in time.”
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Your input is always welcome, but not required to keep the country
running.
Voters can delegate voting authority to multiple representatives delineated across
an array of topics.
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Referenda are then held frequently and categorized by topic,
indicating which proxy (if any) should be prompted to cast their vote on the issue.
This enables a system in which voters can select many trusted experts or advisers to
vote on their behalf. Underlying this ideology is the belief that no one person (or
party) has the full, right answer to every question. In representative democracies this
axiom is often both assumed and ignored.
Robles Elvira is working with governments to build “a highly distributed, unique
log of events really good at solving distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks.”
Blockchain technology enables this. He said, “It is very difficult to create a secure,
distributed system and the blockchain allows us to do this . . . and it’s not just that it’s
distributed, but that it’s distributed in a secure way. This is really important and can be
useful for a lot of applications; e-voting is just one of them.” His company, Agora
Voting, provides the technological infrastructure needed to conduct auditable,
transparent, and verifiable e-elections. “With top-notch cryptographic technology,
humans become the weakest link in the security chain.”
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Spain’s antiausterity party Podemos (translated to “We Can”) uses Agora Voting
to hold its primary elections. With the party’s commitment to participatory democracy
came a commitment to transparency, an ideological shift in Spain and elsewhere
consistent with the one underpinning distributed technologies.
Robles Elvira sees some limitations, too. To maximize security and anonymity, a
user currently needs access to the whole blockchain, a behemoth of a file. Size makes
it difficult to access (especially on a mobile) and decidedly user-unfriendly. Still, the
technology is always evolving and designs are ever improving. “We are at the

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beginning of e-voting,” said Robles Elvira.
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The technology is pliable. Undoubtedly,
its best applications are yet to come.