Blockchain for democracy: Drag voting out of Victorian era, says London’s leading independent Mayoral candidate Rose

Crypto-friendly Mayoral candidate Brian Rose calls for elections to be blockchain enabled, saying technology would make fraud harder and increase voter turnout

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, April 22, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Britain’s "dangerously outdated" voting system must adopt modern blockchain technology urgently, says London Mayor candidate Brian Rose.

He warns that the antiquated paper-based system employed in elections poses a double threat to democracy: it is vulnerable to abuse and it fails to encourage voter turnout.

Rose, the leading independent candidate in the May 2nd election according to a Survation poll this month, is a passionate advocate of digital tech including blockchain and cryptocurrency.

He has pledged that, as Mayor, he will ensure every person in London gets £100 worth of a new capital crypto token – called the LONDON – to spend across London’s transport network, and used to pay council bills, parking charges and more.

It would be funded by a 1% "TradFi tax" on profits of the city’s big banks, a one-off charge that reflects public anger with how the financial sector continues to abuse its power despite being bailed out by taxpayers in the 2008 financial crash.

Rose said: "No one really knows how much influence voter fraud and malicious actors have already had on our elections but clearly, as the geo-political landscape becomes more fraught, it’s only a matter of time before the very core of our democracy is shaken because of organised vote-rigging.

"With critically-important elections looming at a local and national level, ensuring the ballot is free, fair and easy to participate in has never been more important.

"But our voting systems are dangerously outdated and, unless we embrace blockchain technology now, we are inviting an anti-democratic disaster."

Rose believes that London, as a capital city and a place where blockchain technology has already been widely adopted in sectors such as finance, should lead the way in showing how a 21st-century election can be made more secure – and encourage more voter participation.

At present, the Electoral Commission and its regional branch, London Elects, operates a paper-based, vastly inefficient labyrinth of processes hosted at its count venues across the city.

But Rose is calling on his fellow candidates to pledge support for electoral reform to ensure that, in the years to come, Londoners have a voting system they can trust.

He said: "When I first stood to be London Mayor in 2021, the one thing that struck me about the election process here in our nation’s capital is how Victorian the way we vote is.

"In a pre-digital world, the process was about as well designed as something that requires significant amounts of labour-intensive effort can be.

"But, as we approach the threshold of a new cryptocurrency and blockchain-enabled technology revolution, isn’t it time we replaced the risky and difficult to use London Mayor election system with a new, blockchain enabled solution?"

Rose also believes that, by making voting both more secure and easier, blockchain could help to address the appalling voter apathy which blights elections throughout the country.

He said: "No one wants to talk about voter turnout levels which, in the 2021 Mayoral election, were only 42%. In 2012, the year of the London Olympics, that figure was a mere 38% – London could not encourage even two-fifths of its voters to engage with the democratic process.

"None of the other candidates is even acknowledging this – it is as if they want to pretend these figures are somehow acceptable in a modern democracy.

"We must ensure our voting systems inspire participation and confidence in the democratic process. That is why it’s time to start leveraging the power of the blockchain to deliver elections we can all be part of and results we can all believe in."

Rose, who was born in California and is now a British citizen and a passionate Londoner, insists that blockchain technology can play a transformative role in delivering secure, transparent and inclusive elections.

He added: "Blockchain-enabled elections afford a series of benefits, including minimising the risk of vote tampering through the immutability of ledger-based data, safeguarding against cyberattacks by using decentralised systems, and delivering frictionless identity management, meaning that the voting process itself can be taken online.

"It is ridiculous that we are still having to talk about this as if it is somehow in the distant future when the reality is that the technology exists now. And London is the city that can show just how much of an improvement that is on the dusty Victorian system we are currently saddled with."

Howard Bowden
London Real
+44 7818 073213
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