Vision
MiVote, a Melbourne based startup looking to revolutionise the Australian democratic system, approached Transpire with an ambitious challenge – develop Australia’s first online voting platform utilising cutting-edge blockchain technology, enabling participants to vote on public issues with unprecedented confidence and assurance.
MiVote were looking to build an online voting web platform as well as iOS and Android apps. However, as a Not-For-Profit organisation funded by sponsors, it had limited budget and aggressive timelines to be in market.
Solution
The initial MiVote MVP consisted of a CMS, user registration and access system, web app user interface, and the voting mechanism. This was followed by a two-stage development process for the native mobile applications, native recurring donation function, issue reporting, and app analytics.
The online voting platform was built and delivered within MiVote’s limited budget and timeframe by utilising React JS for a responsive HTML front-end, and adopted two-factor authentication for voting authenticity, which can be used across all mobile devices and desktops.
MiVote uses blockchain by replacing ‘Ethereum’ with voting tokens. Each transaction is a vote added to a public record, which can then be tallied and audited by anyone who chooses to do so.
Thanks to the workings of blockchain technology, once a vote has been added to the record it can never be changed or removed.
However, questions such as whether to tumble votes, route them though proxies, or create new wallets for each user on each user were raised to ensure blockchain anonymity.
Impact
MiVote is one of the earliest practical uses of blockchain technology. It is currently on trial with Indian and South American governments.
