During three days, from Friday 11 to Sunday 13 September, voters from 83 Russian regions are being called to elect members of local parliaments and, in certain cases, regional governors as well as federal-level deputies. More than 9,000 local campaigns took place in what observers see as a key test for the country’s pro-Putin ruling party, United Russia.
Amid controversies on potential manipulations of the paper ballots by the authorities, a blockchain voting system has been introduced in two pilot regions, Kursk and Yaroslavl. The system is operated by Rostelecom, the state-controlled national telecom operator, which teamed up with Waves Entreprise, a leading Blockchain vendor, to to develop the system.
“The new e-voting system features superior confidentiality of the voting process due to homomorphic encryption, distributed key generation, and blind signature technologies. Usage of homomorphic encryption along with distributed key generation guarantees that only results can be decrypted, without a chance of decryption in the middle of the voting process, changing results, or just checking a voter’s choice,” pledged Rostelecom and Waves Entreprise.
Thus, decentralized by Waves Enterprise’s blockchain, “all crucial steps of the voting process, including encryption key generation, ballots validation and storage, as well as calculation and decryption of the results, [are managed at] higher levels of data integrity and availability.”
Artem Kalikhov, Chief Product Officer of Waves Enterprise, believes that such as system may have “a beneficial effect on the legitimacy of the government and the election procedure.” In an exchange with East-West Digital News, he assured that the Waves and Rostelecom teams had been working hard to ensure maximum transparency. To his knowledge, the authorities did not interfere in the development of this blockchain-based procedure, which “cannot be falsified.”
On August 31 and September 7, two public tests of the system took place, involving more than 35,000 people. These tests showed no failures or interruptions, but led Waves and Rostelecom to improve the interface for mobile devices and other parts of the system.
Waves also granted the ‘Party of Direct Democracy’ an access to the system to check its architecture, algorithms and data. Their representatives were to observe the procedure on the elections days.
In a bid to increase transparency, the Central Election Commission of Russia has published parts of the source code of the blockchain online voting system.
These praiseworthy efforts might still not be enough to prove the full integrity of the online vote – just a year after statistic abnormalities cast suspicion on an experimental blockchain vote procedure in Moscow’s city elections.
Kalikhov conceded that the new electronic procedure, fully secured in itself, does not cover the electoral process in its entirety. The ultimate interpretation and announcement of the vote are under the responsibility of the authorities, not of the Blockchain.
