After a series of headlines that the March 7 presidential election in Sierra Leone was the first Blockchain-based election in the world due to Agora's support for voting technology, the Government of Sierra Leone officially denied any use of the Blockchin technology to record electoral results by the National Electoral Commission (NEC).
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The process of registering the votes of Sierra Leoneans was as follows: Voters placed ballot papers in boxes, which were then emptied to the election observers for a loud count, while Agora "recorded every ballot manually on Blocchin using a digital device." Agora played no role as soon as the ballot boxes were transferred to the provincial statistical center of the National Election Commission, its publication said.
"What worries me is the uproar that followed," Maurice Marah, founder of the Sensec Tech Center in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, told Radio France International.
"What these people say [Agora] is great, but they have not really tested it because they basically took the results paper and put it on their system, and that's what everyone is doing, that's not new."
In response to allegations of deliberately misleading the public about its role in the elections, Agora issued an official statement on Mediam on March 19. The statement made clear its legitimate role in the elections as an international observer, stressing its previous implicit statements that it never mentioned that it was preparing the official results of the elections in the test of the electoral system of the blockchain.
— National Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (@NECsalone) March 19, 2018