Is Sierra Leone Blockchain Elections Fake News?
The most recent developments in Sierra Leone’s first ever blockchain-based presidential election made a withdrawing step as the National Electoral Commission head claims that no blockchain technology has been utilized as a part of the Sierra Leone election.
A couple of days back, the West African Country Sierra Leone led its presidential elections by using blockchain technology. In any case, the National Electoral Commission of the nation now denies the utilization of blockchain while condemning the news of the nation having the first ever election that was recorded on the blockchain.
The head of the NEC, Mohamed Conteh said that:
“The NEC [National Electoral Commission] has not used and is not using blockchain technology in any part of the electoral process.”
While Agora, the blockchain voting company claimed to run the first elections in view of the blockchain. Clearly, the company didn’t simply watch the process and store the voting results yet was more engaged in the process.
As indicated by the Leonardo Gammar of Agora:
“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate. This is the first time a government election is using blockchain technology.”
The responses relating to the utilization of blockchain were mixed in Africa.
Morris Marah, the founder of Sensi innovation hub, stated:
“Their involvement in all of the result tallying was very limited. It would be like me showing up to the UK election with my computer and saying, let me enter your counting room, let me plug-in and count your results.”
Besides, an examination of both the insights done by RFI uncovered that “Agora’s results for the two districts they tallied differed considerably from the official results.”
There is no clearness on the fact, however, it seems clear that the questionable election space of Africa has turned out to be much more complicated. Given the way that Agora’s token sale is coming, it is yet to be known whether Agora was pulling a marketing stunt.
This circumstance unquestionably leaves every one of us baffling in what could have been a transformational utilization of blockchain technology in Sierra Leone elections.
