In Ukraine, they are carrying out a trial to test the possibility of voting using blockchain technology.
According to Oleksandr Stelmakh, who works for the Central Electoral Commission of Ukraine, the tests began in July, when Stelmakh himself asked his friends on Facebook to take part in a trial vote.
The testing phase was carried out in collaboration with the local NEM Foundation group and uses NEM’s blockchain.
The same platform was used for the emission of the Venezuelan Petro.
The trial period of the experiment has not yet ended and the surveys they are using as tests are still open, so we do not have any results at the moment.
Stelmakh commented: “It must be noted that the experiment was held in the test environment of the blockchain NEM and for the transactions used by the test coins that were kindly given the representative of the NEM Foundation in Ukraine, Anton Bosenko. The blockchain test environment has 28 nodes.”
In addition, Stelmakh pointed out that one of the fundamental basic properties of the blockchain is the impossibility of modifying the saved information and that is precisely why they decided to try to use it to store the information of local voting sessions.
According to some estimates made by the development team, it would cost just over a thousand dollars to place a node, for example in a police station, and could then be installed in thousands throughout the country.
Voting in West Virginia
Meanwhile, a blockchain-based app has been released in West Virginia, in the United States, which will allow military personnel serving abroad to vote in November’s elections. The news has raised a number of concerns on security breach issues and the real need for such a voting system.
In March a pilot version of this app was tested, so it’s not an experiment but the use of a tool that has already been tested. In addition, each county in the state will be able to decide for itself whether or not to use it, but concerns remain.
The problem of very low turnout in the USA is also due to purely bureaucratic reasons, such as the fact that elections are held on Tuesday. Remote voting could help increase the number of voters.
But there are many doubts about the security of smartphones that will be used to vote, mainly due to the fact that it is not possible to verify every single device.
According to the chief engineer of the Center for Democracy and Technology, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, voting with mobile phones is “a terrible idea“.
