Agora, a blockchain startup published what seem to be the earliest results of the hotly contested presidential election in Sierra Leone and the first one to use blockchain technology.

After voting came to an end on Wednesday, 400,000 ballots were manually entered into the Agora's blockchain system by a group of 280 accredited observers operating in different locations.

Presently, the exact number of individual candidates’ votes has not been disclosed to the public but just the percentages. However, Agora, a Switzerland-based foundation, mentioned that in coming days, it would make the results auditable.

While this is a landmark for distributed ledger technology, the disorganized situation surrounding the election and the restricted scope of Agora's work portrays how far-off the blockchain is from achieving its theoretical potential for election.

The Agora technology was approved by Sierra Leone's National Election Committee (NEC) and was not tasked in counting the entire ballots, but only those cast in the most populous district of the country, where Freetown, the capital city is located. The NEC's tally is official and similar with other endorsed observers; the body is offering an autonomous count for comparison purposes.

Leonardo Gammar, the Agora's CEO said, “These are the last outcomes from Agora to the Western area, and the NEC will have their results, as similar to other observers.”

Besides, public blockchain purists might have fallen into trouble to depend on Agora’s count. According to Gammar, some of the Agora’s technology that grants access to node operators is of now patent-pending. Hence, there will not be a whole open-source repository on Github for inspection by outsiders.

Nevertheless, future elections are anticipated to utilize the whole stack of firm’s technology and will be fully auditable by integrating it with a public blockchain.

Gammar added that by closing fraud opportunities and increasing the areas tracked by auditable blockchain software, any uncertainty in elections across the globe will be removed. He mentioned that they were approved by NEC to carry out the task in the Western area. “If they will be happy with the technology, next time, they will make it broader and support us more.” Said Gammar.

Early returns

The Agora’s sample results showed Samura Kamara, the incumbent party candidate of All People's Congress leading in 12 points.

The official NEC results will only be broadcasted earliest on Friday night. The wait might even be longer provided the difficulty factors that cannot be solved by blockchain.

For instance, earlier this week, the Sierra Leone police reportedly raided Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) office belonging to the candidate who came second in Agora’s tally.

The official cause of the raid is alleged for the reason that police suspected ongoing hacking of election, but party leaders claimed that it was an attempt to undermine the opposition.

Despite the setbacks, according to NEC, only 0.2 percent of the election boxes had issues agreeing the statement released on Friday by the European Union Election Observation mission which described the elections as well organized.

“While the tallying process is ongoing, and should the results be finalized in complete transparency, the EU expects every party to respect results of the credible elections and utilize existing methods to address grievances,” the statement said.

In the Western district, Kamara won by 54.7% in Agora’s count, only shy of the 55% constitutionally required for winning a national election. Thus, if the national results are the same, they may need to face a runoff against Julius Bio, the SLPP's candidate, who acquired 32.5 percent of the votes as shown by partial blockchain tally above.