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Requirement
№
155: The system must record the events that happen at the physical
meeting and store them on the distributed ledger according to local legislation or company
requirements.
Physical meetings have additional requirements to the record-keeping compared to digital
voting. In most countries it is required that the voters pre-register, that the protocol is
properly recorded etc. Recording this information in the blockchain alongside the data
required for digital voting will increase the transparency of the process.
Requirement
№
156: The system must provide services to the users voting electronically
during the meeting, including the video streaming of the physical meeting.
Users who vote electronically benefit from the convenience and ease of voting, but pay
for it by being absent at the meeting and missing out on the potentially important
discussions that happen there. The system would add a lot of value to the whole process
if it could increase the involvement of the online voters by providing them with more
means to take part in the meeting, e.g. access the video stream, being able to interact,
ask questions, etc.
Requirement
№
157: The Issuer Agent is able to add new items to the agenda during the
general meeting.
During the meetings, the shareholders may make additional decisions which were not a
part of the agenda originally. The system must be able to support management of these
decisions, as well as voting for them.
Requirement
№
171: The Issuer Agent is able to publish meeting minutes and results on
the distributed ledger.
In most jurisdictions, Issuers are obliged to provide specific reports on the general
meeting results and minutes. If these reports were stored in the blockchain, they would
benefit from its access control and immutability, thus enhancing their legal standing.
2.4.12
Review Voting in Progress
Requirement
№
180: Certain actors are able to calculate the status of the voting campaign
when it is in progress and only some of the votes have been cast.
Voting is normally done blindly, with the Voting Parties not being able to see the progress
until the results are out. But for the Issuer Agents (e.g. issuers or registrars), regulators
or auditors it may be necessary to see the progress.
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2.4.13
Administrative Adjustments
Requirement
№
190: The Issuer Agent is able to adjust the vote amounts.
In some jurisdictions, legislation and other rules may cause adjustments to votes issued
by the Voting Parties. The Issuer Agent should be able to detect the instructions liable for
adjustments and execute the adjustments. It is only possible to adjust the amount of
votes, not the selected outcome. This function must be designed in a way that doesn't
give the administrator possibility to misuse it.
Requirement
№
200: The Voting Party is able to see how its votes have been adjusted by
the Issuer Agent.
The mechanism for adjusting the votes must be transparent. Voting Parties whose votes
were adjusted must be able to easily detect and review the adjustments with any
additional information (e.g. reasoning behind them). This information must be stored on
the blockchain so that it can hold weight in the courts should the Voting Party decide to
challenge the adjustment.
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TRUST REQUIREMENTS
The main added value of DLT is that it enables trust in trustless environments. In
traditional systems, trust is typically achieved by designing business processes in a way
that create incentives for parties to act with integrity and prudence. These processes
come with a lot of double-checking, audit, reconciliation and other validation and
correction mechanisms necessary to make the process work. These steps create a
significant overhead in otherwise simple business processes.
DLT-based systems take another approach to trust. DLT technically guarantees that the
rules of the process are the same for every participant and that these rules are followed.
It eliminates the need to trust actors in the transactions
–
the trust that the process is
executed correctly and on time is now placed in the system itself and can be
independently verified by any actor.
At the same time DLT also plays a role of an immutable golden copy of all data
–
so that
no peer-to-peer reconciliation is needed, as the correct data is always stored in the
blockchain.
These two properties together are the foundation which can drastically decrease the
overhead in many typical processes in the finance industry, allowing for a much higher
level of service that was not possible before.
The lack of trust essentially means that there are risks that have not been mitigated to an
acceptable degree. These risks are inherent in the traditional systems. This section
elaborates on the risks specific to the e-voting including proxy-voting process and
discusses how they can be mitigated via a DLT solution.
It should be noted, that although DLT mitigates a lot of trust issues, strong governance
and correct implementation of the system is still necessary. Any practical service consists
of more than just a ledger with a set of process rules, and the whole system is as weak
as its weakest links. The guarantees of the ledger do not prevent the need of proper
management of confidential data, information security measures to storing private keys
for ledger access and other system governance concerns.