The Electoral Commission of Ukraine is working on mechanisms to improve the local and national electoral processes in that country, through blockchain technology. In this sense, they are carrying out voting tests in the NEM block chain.
The head of the state register of voters, Oleksandr Stelmakh, said through his account on the social network Facebook, that they continue with a series of experiments with the blockchain technology applied to the elections. The start of the tests was announced by Stelmakh himself in a publication on July 10 in the social network, where he made a public invitation to participate in the voting tests.
The official stressed that the tests are being carried out using 28 nodes of the NEM network. He also said that the NEM Foundation of Ukraine "kindly" provides the test cryptoactives required to validate the transactions. These test votes are still enabled for the participation of any citizen.
According to the calculations of Oleksandr Stelmakh, the implementation of the project would have an estimated cost of $ 1,227 for each voting center. In his opinion, this is "a small fee for the preservation of these socially important data for life."
Ukraine is considering the incorporation of distributed accounting in its electoral processes since 2016, when the signing of an agreement to develop an electronic voting platform for that country was carried out. A group of technological firms participated in the project, including the Bitcoin Foundation of Ukraine. For that moment, the signatories committed themselves to create a decentralized, transparent and accessible system of electronic voting, using instruments based on blockchain technology.
Many other blockchain-based electoral initiatives are being developed around the world, and this technology is perceived as having sufficient potential for the construction of reliable electoral systems. Among these global initiatives are the tests carried out in the cryptovalle of Zug in Switzerland and the proof of the vote of citizens abroad, held in Northern Virginia, United States. The latter was cited as an example of the use of blockchain in elections by the Ukrainian official Stelmakh on his Facebook account.