Ordinarily much of the world does not know enough to care about the recently concluded Sierra Leone March 7, election. Not until the small country made ‘history’, with claims that it had become the first to deploy a block chain based voting solution.
At the center of this is a Swiss based company named Agora, which claimed that the blockchain technology was used to tally and audit the polls – a claim which the country’s National Electoral Commission has denied.
Formed in 2015, Agora is a Swiss based voting technology company which boasts ownership of the first end-to-end verifiable block chain voting solution for governments and enterprises.
“Our digital voting platform was partially deployed during the March 2018 presidential elections. Votes from the West Districts were recorded on an immutable blockchain ledger,” the company claimed in their statement that triggered the global coverage.
What We Know
– Agora was accredited as an independent observer by National Electoral Commission in Sierra Leone and has since toned down on its bogus claims following the denial of Sierra Leone’s NEC. In a new blog post the company noted that it was just an observer granted access to cover 280 polling locations in the West Districts of Sierra Leone.
– The Sierra Leone NEC confirmed that it used an existing proprietary tool to tally the results. The tool was developed using C++ and MySQL database. The official 2018 Polling and Counting Procedures Manual reveal that the process remains largely manual.
– Agora claimed to publish the result on their website about 5 days before the end of the official manual count done by NEC. This claim was also countered by Tamba Lamin, a Sierra Leonean IT architect and election technology enthusiast. He wrote in his blog: “The results tallied and published by Agora had no impact on the 2018 Elections. They were published around the same time NEC published the first 25% of the presidential election results.”
– Sierra Leone is keen on trying out new stuff and improving its electoral processes using tech. The NEC was keen to learn from the Agora experiment with a view to employing the system in the future.
– Some experts are in doubt if at all Agora’s deployment was anything close to unique. Several Election Technology activists who spoke to RFI remarked that it was at best a simple database and nothing radically different from other solutions available.
– It appears the company has a checkered history of making bogus claims, Peter Todd, a cryptography consultant tweeted, ”One of the guys behind this, academic Bryan Ford of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), has lied to a few of my clients about the trusted nature of his skipchains tech, which Agora is a showcase of.”
Opposition leader Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) scored the highest number of votes – 43.3 percent, in the first round of elections but failed to secure the majority vote required for him to be announced winner. The Sierra Leone NEC has announced that the runoff election will take place March 27.
