Thailand’s Democrat Party Carries Out Primary Elections On The Blockchain

The biggest opposition party in Thailand, the Democratic Party, hits the crypto news today for becoming the first large political party in the world to conduct primary elections completely on the blockchain.

The party used a live e-voting system where more than 120,000 voters were involved at the start of November. The voting system was powered by the Zcoin blockchain.

Thailand’s Democratic Party was inspired to use the blockchain after a Thai rap music video named ‘’Rap Against Dictatorship’’ became extremely popular for being the first song against the politics in Thailand for music to be stored using a blockchain after there were plenty of indications that the government wants to censor the video. The video was saved on the Zcoin blockchain and this is how the opposition got the idea.

The party elaborated the concept by using IPFS to improve the process of the election record integrity. Voters were able to participate by using a mobile phone app or manual voting at a physical station.

The founder of Zcoin said:

 “I am very proud that Zcoin played a role in making Thailand’s first large-scale e-vote, a reality, which saw greater voter participation and transparency. I believe we’ve achieved a huge milestone in our country’s political history and hope that other political parties or even the government not just in Thailand but in the region can look to using blockchain technology in enabling large-scale e-voting or polling.”

The encryption keys used in the process of voting were split by a cryptographic method which makes sure that you need consensus to decrypt the entire voting data. This means that voter ID documents could be decrypted by an accredited official only.

You can check out the voting activity on the Zcoin blockchain explorer.