According to the officials, a traditional, paper-based voting mechanism is utterly hard to conduct, considering the size of the country.
Furthermore, experts claim that traditional petitions are entirely impractical for Brazil, considering that over 145 million votes have to be collected.
The logistics behind bulletin management for elections are complicated and expensive, and some smaller towns and villages cannot be even reached. This makes the current system ineffective.
Gabriel Barbosa, a research associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, criticized the costs related to the old-fashioned system. Тhe costs are too high for the standard of the country and it is unfair to exclude people from the political decision-making process.
The innovative idea to optimize the system with Ethereum came from Ricardo Fernandes Paixão, a legislative adviser at the Brazilian Congress, and Everton Fraga, a nose-ring sporting designer, and Ethereum Foundation developer.
The duo submitted a petition to the Brazilian Congress for the use of Ethereum blockchain technology, suggesting some benefits: outstanding security, corruption levels decrease, increase in the level of trustworthiness and participation levels.
The Brazilian government is already working on the development of a mobile application supported by the Ethereum network, which will allow people to register online, submit a petition and sign one too. The same will apply to their electoral system.
The Ethereum’s smart contracts system would then collect and keep all the votes. After that, the encrypted signatures are hashed and stored in the Ethereum blockchain structure. In this way, everyone - citizens, politicians, and members of Congress, can verify the credibility of the vote at all times.
Brazil also plans to create a unique for the country digital token. The digital asset would be developed by a process similar to the Ethereum mining technique and would be its own and independent virtual entity.
The reform is regarded as a massive step towards achieving a democratic society and more liberal, corruption-free status quo.
Everton Fraga, one of the leaders of the Ethereum-based project, stated that the implementation of the solution would be a celebration of democracy.
Despite its currently volatile price, technology experts consider Ethereum as one of the most critical developments in applied science.
According to many, the future would be transformed by the Ethereum platform, being on the way to Web 3.0.