User:Brandonqin/sandbox

Blockchain technology has created cryptocurrencies similarly to voting tokens seen in blockchain voting platforms, with recognizable names including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Contribution Draft

Presence of Blockchain Voting Platforms

With the rise of technology in our current political environment, blockchain voting has become an increasingly discussed topic to combat voter fraud and increase democracy. Blockchain voting is the concept of traditional paper voting becoming digitalized through a voting token format where voting information is decentralized and data is easily accounted for. Blockchain voting is a digital ledger, where it relies on a network of nodes to exist, encrypting the information and protecting it from being taken down by a single party. Platforms in the blockchain voting market aim to create increased efficiency and transparency in voting systems where casting votes and counting them are verifiable and simplified. Some examples of these platforms include Democracy Earth, Polyas, Votem, Boulé, and Horizon State.

Democracy Earth is a nonprofit startup with a goal of improving voting systems by utilizing the blockchain. Founded by Santiago Siri, his vision of the platform is to create "political cryptocurrency" by utilizing blockchain-generated tokens from Democracy Earth's processes for users to cast their vote with. With blockchain voting technology, the need for a centralized government authority is removed alongside possible bias, censorship, or corruption issues in the voting and tabulation process. When faced with criticisms and concerns about financial value of the vote token, Siri explained that Democracy Earth plans to mint a maximum of 500 million tokens, each priced at 12 cents, therefore spawning a $60 million market. With current plans within Democracy Earth, employees will also be compensated in the form of these vote tokens.

Polyas was incepted in 1996 with its technology being used to organize the first online election in Finland with 30,000 votes and 3 languages. Started by Wolfgang Jung, the company and its software was eventually passed on to a company called Micromata, which created a new spin-off corporation in 2012 called POLYAS GmbH. Polyas uses private, local blockchains to run its voting procedures, which differs from the general decentralized blockchains. The current services Polyas provide are online voting, on-site live voting, and resolution and amendment voting to customers that range from youth parliaments to corporations. Currently, the company is looking to optimize its "universal verifiability" feature through the reduction of slow communication times while ensuring ballots are counted accurately and are tabulated to official results.

Votem is a mobile voting platform that was created in 2014 by Pete Martin with a goal of 1 billion voters on their platform by 2025. Through blockchain technology, Votem offers services such as online voter registration, accessible voting for those with disabilities, and electronic ballot marking. In August of 2017, Votem had been inducted into the U.S Election Assistance Comission's voting system testing and certification program. With partnerships including the Blockchain Research Institute and the National Association of the Secretary of State, Votem looks to target a broad range of elections, ranging from small, private elections to government elections.

Boulé was founded in 2017 and is a blockchain voting system that focuses on campaign integrity in security and transparency. Boulé is powered through the blockchain platform of Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. They have their own form of voting currency referred to as Boulé tokens (BOU) and launched pre-sale in August of 2017 that was distributed until a ceiling of 10,000 Ethereum. Boulé specializes in using biometric facial recognition alongside other mobile identification methods and encryption to identify and provide anonymity to voter information.

Horizon State is led by CEO Tim Goggin offering two main products, one being a "tamper-resistant digital ballot box" and the second being an engagement platform for users in voting processes. Horizon State currently serves a few customer groups, including governments, councils, unions, political parties, corporations, and broadcasters. Horizon State was awarded a "Technology Pioneer" position by the World Economic Forum as well as a finalist in Blockchain Australia's Government Project of the Year. Horizon State utilizes preferential voting and weighted voting systems to manage candidate selection.

GovTech and Politics

GovTech is the rising concept of utilizing technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence to increase accessibility and efficiency in government and public policy. GovTech is an booming industry around the world, with an estimated worth of $400 billion in total. Different subcategories of GovTech have also found footing, LegisTech being a major one, which is regarding legislative innovation to work between citizens, public servants, and corporations. An example of LegisTech is the work of a group called LabHacker, which recently used data analysis to track hotly debated topic on the House floor in Brazil, and publicly presents the data to keep citizens and other government officials informed. With this field growing, there are a rising amount of players in the market, as well as concerns surrounding private corporations providing software for public government affairs.

Contributions to Final Article Topic

Politics and technology

For my final topic, I have decided to do Politics and Technology. Hearing about new voting and political platform development from speakers like Marci Harris with PopVox and Santiago Siri with Democracy.Earth, i believe that there are many new developments in this field that the article simply doesn't have. Currently, there are some online tools listed for online presentation, but their descriptions are rather short and don't give a good view on what exactly they do. I would like to start there and flesh out the descriptions for these tools. I'd also like to add some more tools that we learned about in class like Democracy.Earth and how blockchain has affected our current voting beliefs. I would love to add a whole new section on blockchain voting and quadratic voting, as this is a new system that is becoming increasingly more popular as an idea. Technology has grown to impact almost all parts of our day to day lives, with the rise of IoT devices, and I'd love to explore how this growth has impacted politics as well. Although our current internal government is still rather technologically inefficient, there are many external developments with the rise of multiple platforms with high amounts of funding backing them looking to make a large impact soon. All this combined with the era of COVID-19 makes it extremely interesting, as now government functions are almost forced to be reliant on technology, as in-person traditional methods just won't cut it. With this new demand for civic tech, I imagine there will be many interesting developments to talk about recently, such as PopVox being currently vetted to be used in Congress.

After checking out the talk page, this is a Start class article, and it doesn't seem to be visited often which is suprising considering the topic, so I'd like to see more sections added as well as detail to current sections.

Here are some possible sources from my bibliography:

1. "Meet the Man With a Radical Plan for Blockchain Voting". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2020-09-28.
2. Finley, Klint (2014-05-05). "Out in the Open: An Open Source Website That Gives Voters a Platform to Influence Politicians". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2020-09-28.
3. "Colorado Tried a New Way to Vote: Make People Pay—Quadratically". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2020-09-28.
4. Heilweil, Rebecca. "Nine Companies That Want To Revolutionize Voting Technology". Forbes. Retrieved 2020-09-28.
5. "Blockchain, Power and Politics: How Decentralization Engenders Freedom". Cointelegraph. Retrieved 2020-09-28.
6. Ray, Shaan (2019-12-15). "What Is Quadratic Voting?". Medium. Retrieved 2020-09-28.
7. https://economics.rice.edu/sites/g/files/bxs876/f/Weyl%20(paper)%20-%20Feb%202017.pdf

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