The Associated Press Has Leveraged Ethereum For Recording US Election Data
Blockchain adoption has just achieved a major milestone. The Associated Press has chosen the Ethereum blockchain to publish calls for the latest US Presidential election.
The nearly 200-year-old New York-based non-profit news agency has been counting votes since its inception in 1848 and will do the same this year too by collecting, verifying votes, and declaring winners in 7000 contests. This comes as the ETH 2.0 deposit contract was just launched.
The Associated Press Takes To Ethereum For Recording US Election Data
It’s official. The Associated Press (AP) is leveraging the Ethereum blockchain system for recording vote count from the ongoing US Presidential election. This is the first time that a decentralized computing system is being used to maintain records of one of the biggest electoral events in history, possibly the closest.
As the counting process is still on, AP’s developer website is inviting poll conductors to integrate their election systems with the ‘AP Elections API’. This way the polling organization’s ‘election results delivery application’ could directly pull election race information from the said API.
Polling organizations can retrieve two crucial pieces of information from the AP Elections API:
- election race information, including vote updates and race calls
- election reports
AP is reportedly using a blockchain-powered information platform, Everipedia’s OraQle software to publish U.S. election race calls cryptographically on the blockchain. As directed by the website, developers can access the smart contracts on Ethereum/EOS.io.
Why Blockchain Though?
US Presidential election is not a new thing for AP. The news agency has been doing it for a little above 170 years now. It has also published election results on its website after the internet came into being. But the problem with sharing this data online (through a centralized server) is that it becomes prey for hackers. Online perpetrators can tamper with the election information and modify the results.
Even AP’s internal team could cause the data to be lost forever through an update, or by a swap of links, for instance. However, on a blockchain, in this case, Ethereum, the election results will always remain accessible minus the ‘single-point-of-failure attack risks’. As long as the nodes keep running.
This comes as Ethereum 2.0’s launch day is nearing. As CryptoPotato reported, Vitalik Buterin officially announced the launch of its deposit contract.
