Topic: [2018-03-20]Mainstream Media Reports of “Blockchain Elections” in Sierra Leone.. (Read 120 times)

The hype around so called applications of “blockchain technology” is nothing new, as many people have successfully used it to get free publicity for themselves, riding the coattails of Bitcoin’s success. But while it so far was limited mainly to promoting ICO tokens and inflating stock prices, now it seems to have crossed a border into political affairs. Today the people behind the election process in the African nation of Sierra Leone had to publicly come out to correct the record about “the world’s first blockchain elections.”

C++ and SQL, No Blockchain

Mohamed Conteh the Chairman of the National Electoral Commission (NEC) of Sierra Leone, the constitutionally-mandated organization supervising voter registration and all public election in the country, has come out to make it clear for the public that despite multiple media reports to the contrary, no distributed ledger technology was used during the country’s 7 March national elections. He stated that “the NEC has not used, and is not using blockchain technology in any part of the electoral process.”

Following the chairman’s statement, the commission even publicly revealed its exact technology used in the process to clear up any misconception. “The National Electoral Commission uses an in-house database to tally election results. This database was originally developed for the elections held in 2012. It was then expanded and updated, prior to the 2018 elections. The database was developed in C++ and runs on MS SQL – neither of which are open source applications. And it does not use Blockchain in any way.”

Read more: https://news.bitcoin.com/reports-of-blockchain-elections-in-sierra-leone-are-all-fake-news