Crowdsource Voting Audit Solutions for Latin American Elections

Contest: Crowdsource Voting Audit Solutions for Latin American Elections

Contest dates:

November 9, 2020 – December 4, 2020 at 23:59 UTC. There will be a 24-hour countdown clock on the last day of possible entry.

Voting cycle:

15 days

The problem:

Auditing of Guatemala’s voting results have off-chain flaws that require a comprehensive on-chain solution. The authors of the current Guatemalan volunteer-based voting audit process have partners in other countries such as El Salvador, Ecuador, Honduras and several other Latin American countries where voting audits face similar problems. Those problems are based on an old system where paper is trusted (Acta#4, see link below) and pictures of this Acta#4 are given to volunteers on a flash drive, which means potential manipulation before this information is provided to volunteers. To combat this issue, Carlos Toriello Herrerias, a Guatemalan activist and blockchain enthusiast, as well as an avid proponent of blockchain technology, created an app to help mitigate this problem; however, it is still an imperfect system since the incoming information is potentially compromised. All of the details are described here.

The task:

Keeping in mind that no laws or actual voting processes can be easily changed, we need to come up with description of a solution using Free TON solve any possible vote count inconsistencies and remove the possibility of manipulation of the vote counting and auditing process, i.e., make vote counting and auditing infallible and to accelerate reporting of voting results information.

Available source of information is the above mentioned Acta#4. Before proceeding every contestant must first review the videos created by Fiscal Digital.

Requirements:

  1. If any submission is subject to proprietary ownership, the owner of such rights explicitly gives up such rights hereby in favor of this contest.
  2. Must be a solution that utilizes the Free TON blockchain.
  3. The description of the solution must be in absolute detail, complete with description of properties, characteristics, features, etc., so that implementation is easy to follow and execute including backend and frontend part.
  4. Come up with criteria to assess the quality of the solution.
  5. Description of methods and/or measures providing the ability to minimize the likelihood of vote count and auditing errors.
  6. The solution should be implemented within the current system without the need for any legislative intervention by the government.

Evaluation criteria:

  1. Solution should be decentralized, i.e. not dependent on any government body or political party

  2. Submission should describe possible attacks by election fraudsters and how a solution can resist it.

  3. The completeness and integrity of the information presented, the UI/UX of the solutions applied, the accuracy and reliability of the attached results all should be considered to be significant for choosing winners.

Voting:

  • The juror must have a solid understanding of the described technology to provide a score and feedback. If not, the juror should choose to “Abstain”.
  • Jurors or whose team(s) intend to participate in this contest by providing submissions lose their right to vote in this contest.
  • Each juror will vote by rating each submission on a scale of 1 to 10 or can choose to reject it if it does not meet requirements or vote “Abstain” if they feel unqualified to judge.
  • Jurors must provide feedback on submissions or lose their reward.
  • The Jury will reject duplicate, sub-par, incomplete, or inappropriate submissions.
  • The number of days for jury voting is hereby set at 15 days.

Rewards:

1st place .…………………………………. 30,000 Tons

2nd place ……………………………………. 27,000 Tons

3rd place ……………………….…………. 24,000 Tons

4th place ……………………………………21,000 Tons

5th place…………………………………….18,000 Tons

6th place…………………………………….15,000 Tons

7th place…………………………………….12,000 Tons

8th place…………………………………….9,000 Tons

9th place…………………………………….6,000 Tons

10th place ………………………………….3,000 Tons

Jury Rewards:

An amount equal to 5% of the total sum of all total tokens awarded to contest winners will be distributed among jurors who vote and provide feedback. This percentage will be awarded on the following basis:

  • The percentage of tokens awarded to the jury will be distributed based on the number of votes each juror casts. For example, if one juror votes 50 times and another juror votes 5 times, the juror who votes 50 times will get 10 times more tokens than the juror who votes 5 times.
  • Feedback is mandatory to collect any rewards.

Procedural requirements:

Accessibility. All submissions must be accessible for the jury to open and view, so please double-check your submission. If the submission is inaccessible or does not fit the criteria described, jurors may reject the submission.

Timing. Contestants must submit their work before the closing of the filing of applications. If not submitted on time, the submission will not count.

Content. Please submit in PDF format. If all or a portion of the original content cannot be in the form of a PDF, simply submit a PDF with links to that original content.

Contact. Each submission must have an identifiable contact that can be matched with your description. If you have not provided a forum description for discussion, then your application should contain links to your online persona, for example, a Telegram ID (preferred) or other direct contact information that can confirm that the submitted work is yours. In the absence of confirmation by the contestant of the authorship of the submitted work, the submission is rejected.

Multiple submissions.

  • Each contestant has the right to provide several submissions if they are all different from one another. If they are too similar, or in any way appear to be partially the same work done twice, or if they appear to be one whole body of work divided into parts to create several submissions, jurors have the right to reject such submissions.
  • If the contestant wants to make an additional submission to replace a previously published submission, the contestant must inform the jury about this fact and indicate which submission is the one to be judged. In this case, only the indicated work will count. If the contestant fails to indicate which submission to judge, only the first submission made will count. The Jury will reject all others.

Disclaimer:

Anyone can participate, but Free TON cannot distribute Tons to US citizens or US entities.

15 Likes

This is a monumental first step toward what can one day become a real vote audit solution for so many countries that experience voter fraud. Case and point – Biden! Even the US isn’t immune. Hard times call for drastic measures. This is an excellent idea toward that goal. Support, support, support!

5 Likes

Big fat YES to changing the world!!

4 Likes

In my opinion this solution can be applied world-wide. There are numerous audit issues in every country, so this can help enormously. I support this contest.

3 Likes

voting systems are one of the best things to add to the blockchain system. unchangeable, transparent and fair systems ensure the credibility of voting. such a development will not be easy. but if it happens, it will be used by everyone. I too would like to one day use my vote in the blockchain system.

2 Likes

Thank you Free TON community for the opportunity to continue building the #Fiscal_Digital movement to expand our borders. We look forward to sharing electoral lessons from Guatemala so that other countries do not repeat our mistakes. Carbon paper technology was invented in 1801 and yet is still the underlying guaranteeing technology used by elections auditors in most of the world. Blockchain is a better technology, offering increased speed with accurate digital custody of election documents while dramatically reducing the costs of elections, particularly in the developing world. We can rescue TRUST in election results worldwide, but we must be able to VERIFY in real-time. #Fiscal_Digital, we count the votes together!

4 Likes

Blockchain voting is the next thing that’s going to happen and it can only happen once it’s been accepted by a country. I saw a discussion on Facebook about some hours ago about decentralized voting and a user shared a vote that was run on blockchain.
I’d love to see this happen soon

Great Solution ! This will give a good result.

Fully support this contest

Well i can only wish good luck to any participants if this ends up being a contest.

When we are talking about voting, i hope that you guys should know that voter privacy & kyc should be essential features build into the system and that’s a quite hard to implement into open blockchain without some sort of cutting edge zero knowledge solution.

Hi, here is my proposal

subbed: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TpSqVrtsF2g4p1triL6bPex3AyjzuZH8wj7RLu9HXG8/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to comment.

Hello, Here is my submission for participating in this contest. Please, you can find the pdf on contest governance page. Thanks a lot.

Why not improve our own voting first? :crazy_face:

1 Like

Hello!

Here is my submission to the contest.


Feel free to comment.

Hello, dear community!

I am participating in the contest.

Please see my submission in the attached file on Governance

Hope you enjoy it, thanks!

Hello,
Here is my submission. I submitted my work to the contest (the PDF is attached to the submission).
kinoXt,
[email protected]

Fully support this contest

And I hope we will.

Still, this thread is not exactly about voting solutions, it’s about voting audit solutions. All FreeTON votings are already on-chain, so no problem to audit them.

Hi there!

I am participating in the contest.

Please see my submission in the attached PDF file on Governance

Hope you enjoy it, thanks!