AP Publishes Election Results on Ethereum’s Blockchain

The Associated Press, which has been counting votes for more than a century and is counting some 7,000 contests in USA, has been publishing their calls for the November 3rd election on the ethereum blockchain.

You can see a screenshot above. There’s quite a bit of gibberish, but this one happens to be for Biden.

As you might know, computers “talk” in 0s and 1s. There are then methods to decode them, with the most used ethereum blockchain explorer, etherscan, showing the somewhat decoded results above.

These results obviously are on AP’s site as well, but after the results are published the site could be hacked to change the data.

In addition, in a few years time no one might care about this section of AP’s website except for researchers and historians. So AP itself might, with the passage of time, perhaps fully forget about it or change the links in a site update, with easy access to the data potentially lost.

On the blockchain, on the other hand, the data will never change and will always be accessible as long as one ethereum node keeps running anywhere in the world.

Making this the first time the blockchain is being used to maintain records of unfolding events in one of the closest election in history where the vote counting has not finished and the winner remains unknown as of writing.

“The Associated Press (AP), the world’s most trusted news agency, will distribute race calls to Everipedia, a market leading blockchain knowledge company, which will publish them cryptographically on the blockchain through a new oracle product that is powered by Chainlink infrastructure,” Everpedia says.

AP itself confirms as much, publishing its public key which then led us to the above screenshot of their calls on the ethereum blockchain.