South Korea will test out a new blockchain voting system this month, sources close to the developments have confirmed to Bitcoin Magazine. Developed by the country’s National Election Commission (NEC) and its Ministry of Science and ICT, the distributed ledger system is based on IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric and will be used to authenticate voters and save voting results in real time.South Korean officials believe a blockchain voting system will increase both security and transparency, thereby improving people’s trust in digital voting. The NEC initially ran an online voting system dubbed “K-voting” back in 2013, but, despite 5.64 million users, trust remained low due to fraud and hacking concerns. The system will be trialed in the private sector by Handysoft Consortium, which provides collaboration systems for smart work environments. The NEC says the trial is a pilot test designed to determine the viability of blockchain technology, wherein a small sample of users will use the pilot to answer a questionnaire.With the pilot, the voting system will be used to gather responses from surveys issued by the Korea Internet and Security Agency — the region’s official internet content watchdog — on user experience, including satisfaction among trial participants. Their personal information is then collected from the user group administrator and uploaded directly to the blockchain system, where it is stored for the n...
