“The world’s first blockchain elections” in Sierra Leone is fake news
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 on the coattails of Bitcoin’s success.
A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography and is inherently resistant to modification of the data.
But while it so far was limited mainly to promoting initial coin offering 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.”
N'fa Alie Conteh the Chairman of the National Electoral Commission 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.”
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