Kaspersky Lab wants to take advantage of what happened in the US recently. It's about the Iowa primary scandal, specifically the fact that the voting system turned out to be so faulty that after 24 hours the winner of the election was still unknown. Iowa, we have a problem! On February 3, Iowa held a vote to help determine the presidential candidate in the Democratic camp. Helping the process was the IowaRecorder app, which was developed by Shadow Inc. a company that had already worked with Hillary Clinton's staff. The year 2016 was marked by attacks by Russian hackers on Democratic Party servers. However, it turned out that the Democrats did not need cyber criminals from Moscow to compromise themselves in the eyes of Americans. Their contractors from Shadow Inc. were enough. The application did not work as expected and as a result, within 24 hours it was not clear who had won the primary. Success was self-proclaimed by Pete Buttigieg and then Amy Klobuchar. The media claimed that their pet - Bernie Sanders - had won. It was not until 3 days later that it was revealed that the electoral votes were distributed as follows: 14 went to Buttigieg, 12 each to Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, 8 to Joe Biden and only 1 to Klobuchar. The biggest losers turned out to be Shadow Inc. and... the Democrats. The result was clear: modern people power needs better systems for counting and recording votes. The issue became a topic of public debate. According to security experts, the incident (though that's probably too weak a word for what took place there) in Iowa highlighted the risks of relying on current digital systems. "When something as important as an election is involved, frankly, the abuse is in allowing proprietary software," said Joshua Simmons, a board member of the Open Source Initiative, which promotes open source software. "Licensed open source software ensures that security researchers can access everything and improve the software before it is used," he added. Kaspersky Lab goes to the aid of democracy Unsurprisingly, Kaspersky Lab, a company based in Russia, is going to the aid of democracy. Blockchain could help in creating a new voting system. "Open source is an important step in creating transparency, nurturing trust and building more resilient systems," - Simmons previously quoted said. But how does the Russian giant want to improve voting? Through its already existing Polys program, which will be augmented by blockchain for this. What would this look like? Polys users - and thus voters - would be assigned unique QR codes or tokens. The next step would be to scan them and cast a vote for a specific candidate. The process itself would still provide democracy participants with complete anonymity - just like voting with paper ballots. This is because the vote would then be encrypted. What's more, there is an additional option in all this that is not possible today. Once you mark your favorite with a cross and put your ballot into the ballot box, you don't actually know what happens to it. You have no certainty that someone will not manipulate your correctly cast vote. In a world where we vote using blockchain, things would be different. Voters would be able to verify that their vote was registered on the blockchain. This method obviously reduces the likelihood of fraud that comes with ballot tampering. It introduces a kind of control of vote counters by citizens. As if the advantages were not enough, it is worth adding that it solves the problem of accessibility to polling stations. This issue was recently discussed in India. Today, still a large part of voters have difficult access to places where they can vote. Thus, it is not uncommon for them to give up this privilege. Such a system may also encourage younger people to participate in the celebration of democracy. Roman Aleshkin, Polys project manager, explained to the media the advantages of such a model: "(...) we understand the problems and inconveniences that [our clients] face when organizing paper-based voting. As we see it, voting on our Polys platform can solve some of these problems, providing more opportunities for remote participation and even increasing youth turnout." An opportunity for democracy Today there is increasing talk of a crisis of democracy. The Edelman 2020 trust barometer, which we have cited in the past, measures people's trust in institutions. It recently showed that citizens form their trust in the state based on competence and ethical behavior. But the report found that neither business nor government is perceived as competent and ethical. The Iowa scandal certainly won't improve that score. Thus, blockchain systems could improve this state of affairs. Will the European Union bet on blockchain? However, Kaspersky Lab is still a Russian company. In the context of the 2016 hacking scandal, it cannot inspire full confidence in the US, especially in the realm of politics and voting. If you would
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