The ‘geeks’ behind blockchain solution to electoral fraud

What you need to know:

  • These gallant youths came up with a foolproof blockchain system that seeks to stop  the theft of votes and other malpractices that dog democracy in Africa

In every democratic nation, election is an important process that ensures a regular spruce up of development ideas and leadership.

It directly influences how a nation is governed and the sharing of resources, which is why election is a matter of life and death in some countries.

In Kenya, polls have been anything but free and fair, tainted with cases of ballot box stuffing, rigging, voter bribery and other malpractices.

With the general election only a month away,  chances are, we might still witness such misconduct. 

However, a group of lawyers, techies and policy experts who won accolades for their digital innovation on streamlining the election process, envisions a free and fair system where technology is the key player.

The members of Geeks for Geeks group that won this years’ Africa Law Tech Hackathon, an annual festival that brings together great minds in the fields of law, policy and technology,  explained to MyNetwork the intricacies of a partnership that birthed a solution to one of the country's endemic challenges.

Afandi Indiatsi, a computer scientist working as an IOT engineer.

I am a computer scientist specialising in the internet of things (IOT) and machine learning, a form of Artificial Intelligence.

I am very passionate about quality education and it is what I work on as the students’ programmes manager at SteamLabs Africa, a non-profit organisation that teaches science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (Steam) to children aged between six and 18.

Aside from that, I am very passionate about using technology to solve our everyday problems and streamline processes such as elections.

It’s worth noting that Asian countries run fully electronic systems in their elections to ensure transparency. In Venezuela, for instance, there is even an audit of all ballot papers that are assigned.

Once a voter casts their vote, a receipt is generated to capture that. It indicates the polling station without releasing confidential information about the voter. 

On the other end of the divide, we have countries such as Germany and New Zealand, which tried using fully automated election systems but resorted to return to manual processes.

This serves to show that we can’t yet completely eliminate human labour in the polling process, but can reduce it, to mitigate malpractices.

Our team’s solution thus focused on the reduction of human labour in the election process to curb problems like ballot box stuffing.

From our research, we found that in Kenya, there was evidence of election observers complaining that election officers and returning officers would either add or deduct the number of ballot boxes and papers submitted while on transit to the tallying centre.

We also looked at how the public can influence voting. The best case study for this is Somaliland that used biometric, specifically iris recognition systems to authenticate voters.

Whereas they had a good voter verification system in place, the elders in the country influenced the poll clerks to register invalid voters into the system to boost numbers for particular candidates.

Therefore, our solution is to reduce human involvement to avoid such kind of manipulation and boost transparency.

When talking about transparency, it’s not just limited to elections officers but also the people, which is an aspect that has been missing. Broadcasting the tallying of results in the media is not enough transparency.

To have more, we need to start talking about real time tallying of votes to eliminate the transportation of ballot materials to a central tallying centre.

Just like Venezuela, we can audit our elections to avoid ballot box staffing, and although it’s too late for us to adopt robust technological changes ahead of the August 9, poll, we can still reduce human labour and incorporate certain digital aspects that are more transparent and seamless.

Keith Martin, machine learning engineer based in Nairobi

I graduated from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology with a degree in information technology and currently work as a machine learning engineer for the Artificial Intelligence Centre for Excellence in Africa, based in Kenya.

Additionally, I blog about machine learning and data science.

In the Law Tech Africa Hackathon, I was the manager of my team, Geeks for geeks, ensuring that every member is assigned a task that they can handle.

Additionally, with my experience working in machine learning, I was in charge of building the computer vision for the project.

The theme for this year’s Hackathon, was  ‘Streamlining the election process’. After looking at the entire election processes, we realised there is a lot of human labour involved and this could be one of the reasons why poll  malpractices continue to plague many countries and electoral institutions.

As a team, we focused on eliminating people in the counting of votes through the use of an automated vote counting system that requires no human intervention.

In the system we built, once a vote is cast, it is passed to a scanner that sends the image directly to a foolproof blockchain system.

From the blockchain, the vote cast is reflected on a dashboard, which updates the tally of votes. Since we could not build our own scanner in a short time, we used a mobile application to simulate a scanner in our presentation.

We then built a mobile application from which a computer vision model can scan the votes and send it to a blockchain system, from where we could display the votes of each candidate.

Blockchain is tamperproof. All these were built by our team in just 20 hours.

Our team emerged the best in the Hackathon and we will be representing Kenya in this year’s Deep Learning Indaba continental conference happening in August in Tunis, Tunisia.

After that, if we are lucky enough and our solution catches someone’s eye, we hope to partner with investors to actualise this system because it is a solution that transcends across multiple fields.

It can be used in schools, hospitals and other places. It all depends on how we tweak our solution to suit the problem.

Julius Miiri, a lawyer specialising in comparative constitutional and technology

I am a legal compliance specialist and a researcher in comparative constitutional law, administrative law and technology law.

In the Geeks for Geeks team, I was in charge of incorporating legal aspects into the invention. As a lawyer, mine was to check whether the system complied with the Constitution, Elections Act and other enabling legislations in so far as the polling process is concerned in Kenya.

The collaboration between professionals in law, policy and IT is important. We can’t ignore the fact that technology is evolving every day, especially if you want to remain in business.

The digital shift has had impact in the legal field in areas such as research, which has been made easier by the digitisation of court reports through Electronic Kenya Law Reports (eKLR) which has replaced law books.

You can now do a digital contract and even file cases through the Judiciary e-filing platform that assesses and receives court documents from the comfort of your office.

Today, after the effects of Covid-19,  most of the hearings and mentions take place online. This has helped to reduce costs while improving convenience.

In developing the solution, we had our eyes fixed on helping the country achieve true democracy. This means that there is free, fair and competitive election, full adult suffrage, freedom of the press, speech and association as guaranteed under chapter four of the Constitution on the bill of rights.

While Kenya has achieved to protect some of these rights, it still struggles to meet the right to free and fair elections.
Elections in the country have high stakes and there has never been one without allegations of uneven playing field.

Additionally, the IEBC has had issues with counting and transmission of results. In the last election, there were cases of repeat counting of votes and we even had the 2017 presidential elections results annulled for this reason.

This year, we’ve even seen political parties recounting nominations votes and getting different results from what was earlier reported.

Kenya, being a democratic state with a transformative law, there is a need to increase the use of technology and reduce manpower in order to deliver better elections.

With less than two months before Kenyans choose their next crop of leaders, it is my hope that IEBC will put in place a system to legitimise numbers.

Additionally, from a legal standpoint, I expect that the principles of electoral integrity; accuracy, verifiability, security, accountability and transparency will be adhered to in the coming polls.

Grishon Ng'ang'a, a software engineer specialising in machine learning and blockchain

I am a software developer working for Adanian Labs in Nairobi, a studio that aims to build startup unicorns in Africa. I work under Blow, an initiative by Kevin Wairegi, popularly known by his stage name Wyre.

The initiative seeks to help artists earn from their craft right from the beginning of their careers.

A lot of my days involve writing codes, attending meetings and pitching ideas that we build to potential partners, artists and other people in this ecosystem.

In the Law Tech Hackathon, I was in charge of incorporating  Blockchain in our solution. To put it in simple terms, a block is a kind of a database that stores information like any other database.

However, it has certain characteristics that distinguish it from other databases. One, it is decentralised and no one person or entity can claim ownership of the information that is in the database.

Everyone  in the blockchain keeps a copy of the database and has a say in it.

Secondly, a blockchain is permissionless, a term coined to mean that any willing party can join and participate in the network without restrictions.

Finally, it’s tamper-proof. Any information put in the blockchain cannot be changed by anyone else.

Cryptocurrencies, which have been trending lately, are all based on this technology.

For you to store information in a blockchain, you need to pay a small transaction fee to a person in the network, who validates the information before being stored.

It is from this form of payment that crypto currencies arose and found other uses in the world like the idea of digital gold; using blockchain as a store of wealth and value.

And now, people are putting money in blockchain as a form of investment. There have since been developments that have given rise to concepts such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralised autonomous organisations.

Our solution to streamline election processes had to be on blockchain for two main reasons, immutability and traceability. It means it can address the generic problems in our elections where votes are stolen or figures manipulated.

These are issues of integrity and transparency, which our project solves. I believe we stand to benefit as a country if blockchain is implemented in our electoral systems.