Blockchain voting may become possible in the next Stakeholders in Blockchain Association of Nigeria (SiBAN) general elections.
Politics has always been known in Nigeria to be a ‘dirty game’ and elections ultimately show to the public the result of the many tricks and tricks employed by politicians to achieve their goals.
With the lack of faith in elections in Nigeria, champions of the decentralized technology, blockchain have come to believe that blockchain will help to eliminate the multitude of malpractices in elections in Nigeria.
While these leaders of the decentralized world hold strong to this belief, it hasn’t been put into practice on a significant scale.
This could all be a thing of the past soon as Quru Lab has built a blockchain based voting application for SiBAN.
Quru Labs is a software development company operating out of the City of Agbor in the Oil rich state of Delta, Nigeria.
Quru Labs is led by Henry Chukwuka, who is also the Founder & CEO of crypto savings app Muna.
According to the company’s website, the blockchain based voting dApp is called “Siban Voting dApp”. It is described as a “decentralized community voting dApp for SiBAN elections. Real-time, open-source code smart contract voting system based on blockchain.”
The voting mechanism is automatic with just a few clicks, your voting is registered, the dApp landing page read.
The SiBAN Voting dApp is powered by the Waves Blockchain Web 3.0 blockchain platform. Each vote is counted by smart contracts deployed on the Waves decentralized blockchain and it can be tracked by anyone on the go.
Voters can easily cast their votes using the dApp without having to install a browser plugin.
The last SiBAN elections saw Senator Ihenyen emerge as the President of the Association. While a lot of people had much to say about the conduct of the election, Marvelous Akpere wrote an opinion article titled “SiBAN 2020 Election: Golden Opportunity that was lost”.
In this article, Marvelous said the association failed to utilize the golden opportunity to project itself for what it stands for. That single idea infused several ideas – decentralization.
In the article, he wrote,
“As an organization that is supposed to be a beacon of light to the industry, a pace setter, SiBAN whose operation is in the decentralized space relied on the creation of an organization that had multiple sources of failure; a central authority that could shape the election to whatever agenda. This is a problem actors in the decentralized space have been continually stressing on. As a forward looking industry, SiBAN was supposed to through the election make a statement of what it represents. That statement is the one of letting the world know that free and fair elections that are seamless and easily auditable can be done using the blockchain technology.”
While that election had its issues, Senator Ihenyen who emerged the President and his team would quickly get work to build a united and reformed SiBAN and drive Electoral Reforms.
In an interview on CryptoTvplus, Senator Ihenyen after emerging the President said referring to the issues that arose as a result of the election,
“And when you talk about decentralization, it’s many voices and not one voice and we do not quiet these voices and we don’t intend to change. What we want to drive is a reformed SiBAN. SiBAN needs a couple of reforms.”. “If I was inaugurated yesterday, I would have announced it. We’re coming up with constitutions; we’re reviewing our constitution; we need to be better ruled, we cannot pretend about that. We need electoral reforms.” he added.
In an interview with Quru Lab’ boss, Mr. Henry Chukwuka, he said the SiBAN Voting dApp came after the events of the previous election.
“We thought of doing the voting exercise on Amadi (a wave decentralized wallet) but it wouldn’t be flexible, thus we decided to to build the dApp for the SiBAN community.” The dApp was built in such a way that non-SiBAN member will not be able to vote because members’ wave address will be whitelisted.”
The dApp is live and whenever the community want to conduct an election, they can use the dApp, he said.
“The SiBAN Voting dApp will make the entire voting process transparent and real time.” – Henry Chukwuka
With almost a year served by the current SiBAN Exco, the lines may just be falling in pleasant places for the current SiBAN Executives and the vision of President Senator Ihenyen of initiating electoral reforms may just have come true already.
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