A Ukrainian official is exploring the way blockchain technology could be integrated into the election system.
Oleksandr Stelmakh, a member of the Ukraine Central Election Commission, commented on August 7 via his Facebook page about the current blockchain-powered trial. The project began in July after Stelmakh inspired several friends to take part in a “test vote” – designed in collaboration with the NEM Foundation and NEM’s blockchain protocol.
“One of the basic useful properties of the blockchain is the impossibility of making changes to the saved information …These are the properties we tried to use to save the information of the local ballot sessions,” Stelmakh stated, adding that:
“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. ”
As written by the official, costs for placing one node used in voting reaches $ 1,227, which in Stelmakh’s opinion is a “small” price for this kind of technology.
The blockchain-powered experiment on the voting process isn’t finished, and users are still able to participate in polls using “test coins”. The project represents the latest attempt to integrate blockchain technology for tabling votes – which aims to digitize the recordings and simplify the data verification mechanism.