In its quest for effective governance, the Brazilian government is taking steps to move popular petitions and its current inefficient electoral system onto the Ethereum Network – this is to help the respective government agencies to process millions of votes and petitions on the immutable blockchain network.

With a voting population of over 145 million, it is believed that moving the electoral system onto the Ethereum network will ensure more credibility for the process of electing public officials into office. Blockchain technology is arguably the most transparent technology currently in existence and it helps to ensure that credible verification of votes and other such related petitions can be easily conducted by members of the public due to the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). A section of the Brazilian populace believes that the current electioneering system is fraught with a lot of inefficiencies as such the need for an improvement. For years, civil society and political analysts have bemoaned the structural problems confronting popular petitions and the electoral system of Brazil as a major reason for the country’s political issues.

As reported by Joon Ian Wong of Quartz, members of the Brazilian legislature led by Congress legislative adviser Ricardo Fernandes Paixao and Prof. Everton Fraga are working on using the Ethereum blockchain network as a means of storage and processing of electoral votes and popular petitions.

Additionally, adopting blockchain technology in this process means that processing of petitions and votes can be encrypted as transactions on immutable blockchain which will help to ensure that the data cannot be altered or tampered with and it also becomes publicly available and instantly accessible.

The processing of petitions on the Ethereum network will require smart contracts and this is to work just like other Decentralized Applications (DApps) that run on the Ethereum network. So inadvertently, the Brazilian election system will act and work as a decentralized application of its own with an independent digital token and this will be used to process every single vote on the blockchain.

Speaking to QZ, Henrique Costa, a law professor at the Unversidade de Brasilla said the lack of an immutable platform had been a challenge to past governments in their collection of signature of votes.

“In part this is due to the absence of a platform that can securely collect signatures of one percent of voters. We’ve been through a sort of crisis regarding the legitimacy of our laws. Although the popular initiative does exist, there is no secure way to collect people’s signatures so people can propose bills themselves”

The Brazilian government is currently exploring the possibility of making use of a mobile app based on the Ethereum blockchain network which citizens can use to submit petition votes. If the piloting and working of this goes well, it can be extrapolated to the country’s electoral system.