Russia has had a lot of interactions with crypto and blockchain industries in the last few years. Less than a year ago, the reports revealed that the country plans to use blockchain for selling diamonds. Only days ago, the country’s bank made a first-ever crypto-backed loan.
Now, Russia even started conducting tests for blockchain voting, right before the elections scheduled to take place in September.
Russia develops blockchain voting to deal with coronavirus
Russian elections are approaching, but the situation with COVID-19 is still far from being resolved. With people mostly still keeping at home, the authorities have had to come up with a remote voting system.
With recent recognition that the blockchain technology has been receiving, the government seems to have decided to give DLT a chance, and use the security of blockchain for developing a voting system.
The experiment has been on-going for a while, and the Russian Central Election Commission revealed that more than 30,000 people already participated. These volunteers completed the election process electronically. They went through an entire process, from registering on the network, to helping with vote counting.
The study itself was run by the country’s telecom giant, Rostelecom, which collaborated on the experiment with the Ministry of Digital Development. Meanwhile, the telecom developed the necessary tech with Waves Enterprise. According to officials, vote counting took less than a minute, which already makes it highly efficient.
Verification is necessary, but honesty is guaranteed
In order to vote, participants had to go through identity verification, which also required the technology interfaced with a government portal. However, the officials said that there were no problems or difficulties along the way.
Engineers still conducted tests to try and predict potential issues, and either resolve them ahead of time, or create plans of action in case such problems emerge in practice.
Considering that the first round of testing was reportedly very successful, more experiments are on the way. The country will hold public testing in a few days, on August 31st. With news of election fraud coming from all over the world, using blockchain for honest voting is considered a very worthy effort, and many are glad to see new developments in the sector.
Source: https://invezz.com/news/2020/08/27/russia-tests-blockchain-voting/
