Centro Cultural Miguel Ángel Asturias, Centro Civico, Guatemala City, Guatemala
conducted_by
Yashica Minitec Super, Fujifilm 400
inscribed_by
Tomas's ORD 0.14.1
article_title
Can Bitcoin improve trust in politics? Guatemala’s election in review.
introduction
The opportunity to revisit Guatemala - year later after the initial assessment of Lago di Bitcoin project at [Panajachel](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/guatemala-town-mining-bitcoin-with-used-oil), has been contemplated with a set of mixed emotions. Temptation to better understand the challenges of contemporary societal structures of Central America have however prevailed. The privilege was the friends - Bitcoiners, that spoke of what is going on, building up motivation to open the Pandora’s box of Guatemalan history. Being in the advantageous position of neutrality allowed me to have a decently unbiased assessment of the unfolding situation. The topic was approached with hope to cherish Bitcoin’s use cases and verify the integrity of presumed accountability in the [election process](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-blockchain-is-fighting-fraud-in-guatemalas-presidential-elections). Guatemala has undergone waves of shocks associated to the challenging political instability. Few months ago, the presidential victory of Bernard Arevallo and final election outcome brought people to the streets in weeks long state-wide protest including days of total blockades. Reasons for participation varied, however, the key theme was the desire to establish fair and transparent democracy in line with preventing MP - the general prosecutor, to start an investigation. Pursuing the ‘election fraud’ claims would restart the whole election In disagreement with MP, people rallied to support Arevallo’s success causing a contemporary turmoil that continues to have meaningful ramifications whilst the topic remains developing. ..but one might ask, why even bother looking into the history and politics of this Central American country? Not only it‘s neighbouring El Salvador which has adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender, it is actively competing with the amount of places accepting Bitcoin as a payment method on the [btcmap.org](http://btcmap.org). Where it trumped others is the use of cryptographic primitives in the search for truth. Bitcoin played a pivotal role in securing the integrity of digital data in the most recent presidential elections. The authenticity proof was based on [OpenTimeStamps](https://opentimestamps.org/) [OTS] and the core tenets of this implementation were well [explained](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/documentary-bitcoin-guatemalas-presidential-elections) here. SimpleProof has stored the hashes of more than 12k yellow voting papers - sources of truth, in the chain preventing potential forgery of the scanned PDF documents. These yellow papers were used as means to validate the vote count and final results. “[Immutable Democracy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0nnM5_Z90E)” premiered at Lugano’s Plan B in collaboration with [FilmFest](https://bitcoinfilmfest.com/) & got to be seen at Adopting Bitcoin with additional panel discussions as well.
pursuit_of_truth
The fundamental challenge of this technical implementation lays in the deeply entrenched corruption & plutocracy across the governmental structures including those of Guatemala. Main concern is the actual voting process - human participation and involvement, in the pursuit of digital certainty. If the claims of fraud in the electoral booths prove to be correct or are taken into consideration by a significant portion of voters, such use case *threatens* to impact not only the reputation of Bitcoin but also the **truth** between digital and physical ecosystems. Thinking beyond, this application might be not considering the potential negative consequences if replicated with intention to specifically *legitimise* the fraudulent activity - elections in authoritarian regimes f.e. Despite the significant success in leveraging the properties of immutability, chain security and decentralization alongside the election process, such an execution has just further showcased the levels of fragility in the existing political systems. Thus the attempt to expand on the premise of using Bitcoin as a political truth machine might lead to further delegitimizing one of its core tenants - to create neutral sound money. Bitcoin does not understand politics and setting certain precedent for government decisions might backfire in the future and hurt the years of great work in advancing this presumed neutrality. If this has not been clear, in no way I do associate behind either side of this turmoil but instead stand with the ‘orange coin good’ narrative. Nonetheless, it seems meaningful to call out the inherent challenges of the real world events before over-celebrating success.
election_process
Guatemalan elections consisted of two rounds - first to select presidential runner ups whilst electing city mayors. The second round took only because no one had above 50% to elect the official president. Speculation that certain suspicious machinations took place already emerged in the first round with the ‘removal’ of several candidates be it native Mayans or Trump-like businessman. In the capital of Guatemala City, the new mayor has won only by a small margin - few hundreds of votes, and the software used for counting votes was deemed inappropriate for presidential second round. That lead to uncertainty on how were the ‘yellow-papers’ counted and by whom delivered for scanning. These actions remain questioned even after the results were set as definitive. Overlooking the strong growth of Arevallo’s position from essentially unimportant candidate before the first presidential round to becoming a president, one might also wonder where was the support coming from. For the second round, additional allegations were raised extending the mistrust in the ongoing process to establish fair democracy. Party formation signatures of Arevallo's party inception remain to be challenged at the moment with apparently deceased people being used as signers. What is however one of the most shocking observations is the fast pace of the second route vote count taking only ~30 minutes for most of the electing country. These results had to include OTS validation with PDF scanning and despite having existing experience compared to the first round, the speed of evaluation remains staggering. As previously said, since the system in Guatemala City did not work after first round, the ‘yellow papers’ moved in between set of peers to reach their digital finality. To experiment and further add bits of entropy, we have evaluated some of these claims - swiftness of the count, speed of upload with verification, and Benford’s law of the vote count. This law describes the relative frequency distribution for leading digits of numbers in dataset investigating financial and now voting frauds. Upon doing so, three screenshots submitted to MP were inscribed into Bitcoin at block [814410](https://ordinals.com/block/814184) via Ordinals protocol. Historically, Ordinals have not been actively used to preserve ‘free speech’ related to politics or forms of investigative journalism, although, [Project Spartacus](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/someone-is-inscribing-all-of-wikileaks-infamous-afghan-war-logs-on-bitcoin) shines as a wonderful example. Leveraging Ordinals allowed us to preserve a seed of uncertainty over ‘the digital truth’ but also retain a degree of faith to improve this functionality and thus trust in our ecosystems, including the political establishment. Especially when novel solutions such as [TrueVoteOrg](https://twitter.com/TrueVoteOrg) begin to walk the same challenging path as SimpleProof.
looking_beyond
Much of the above information comes from independent research via interviews across both Guatemala City and Antigua whilst others from SimpleProof’s own experience being close to the election process. These interviews and conversations were conducted throughout the interactions with a set of random participants. They varied in the levels of involvement and understanding but almost all of them participated in the protests be it willingly or unwillingly - as they would be ‘shut down’ anyway. Speaking with mostly young cohort, they want to accept the results of the election as it seems to be their ‘new hope’ for a better future. Some went ahead with stating that even if there is a valid confirmation of election fraud, the country should give Alvaro a chance. Most have however supported transparency and desire to find the truth as they are dissatisfied with theft and corruption ravaging the country. Everyone clearly wants change but what will be the change like? The answer is left up to Guatemalan people and their actions. At once, it might all seem like a tremendous mess and from what was observed, it also likely is. Human participation in something as large as elections is not ever going to be truthfully validated by Bitcoin’s blockchain but there is clearly an edge against the existing solutions. Simpleproof and OTS succeeded in something that is worth exploring. Nonetheless, the risk of adding credibility to these verification systems might be a burden to Bitcoin’s neutrality and ultimately jeopardise the mission to improve our money. Truth can do better.