Thammasat’s new blockchain-based voting platform proves to be safe and tamper-free
Thammasat University’s blockchain-based voting platform, which won an award from the House Secretariat, has been adopted by several savings cooperatives after proving to be successful in 2019.
The ThaiVote.io was first used for the election of the board of directors of Surat Thani’s Public Health Saving Cooperative.
After its initial success, Thammasat landed a contract to hold an election for the cooperative every year.
The platform, the development of which kicked off in 2017, was funded by the Physical Education Department and developed by the university’s Centre of Intellectual Property and Business Incubator.
Prof Dr Arnat Leemakdej, director of the Intellectual Property Centre, said the platform helped not just speed up the election process of the Surat Thani cooperative but also reduced the cost.
He said that previously, the cooperative used 30 polling booths, some of which were on islands, and vote counting became difficult. Also, many members of the cooperative, who are nurses and medical personnel, could not cast their votes due to work commitments.
However, he said, with this platform, everybody can cast their votes and results can be released very quickly.
Arnat said the ThaiVote.io was different from other electronic voting systems, that normally use a central base and servers. He said systems like this have a problem with transparency, as admins can tamper with the results and systems can be hacked.
On the other hand, Thammasat’s blockchain system stores encrypted data, which is then split among other public blockchain centres.
Arnat said once information is stored in a blockchain node, it cannot be altered, so the level of safety and trustworthiness is very high.
“Blockchain-based systems prevent attacks and interference with results,” he added.
He also said that each vote cast is confidential and the result can be learned soon after the voting is closed.
A list of eligible voters, candidates and start and stop of voting times are preset in the system, which starts automatically at the correct time.
Eligible voters can then cast their vote via their smartphones or even notebook computers after identifying themselves with a one-time password (OTP), face scan or ID card.
Once the voting ends, the system will process the data and announce the results within 15 minutes.
So far, he said, the system has been adopted by the savings cooperatives of the Justice Ministry, CAT Telecom and the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives.
The platform won the university an award from the House Secretariat in June this year. TU rector Kesinee Withoonchart said the platform had been developed with the goal of serving society and the university hopes it will be more widely adopted.
