Ukraine: Election officials launch voting trials using blockchain

The use of blockchain in elections is being investigated by a member of the Ukraine Central Election Commission, Oleksandr Stelmakh.

For the commission, a 'test vote' in association with NEM Foundation was created in July. The feature focused on using NEM’s blockchain policy. Encouraging his friends on Facebook to participate, Stelmakh, an official at the Central Election Commission, started the trial run.

As reported in Coindesk, speaking of the involvement of blockchains, Stelmakh said: "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."

He further spoke of the cost on placing such a node in each of the police stations. The amount rounded up to $1,227 was a “small” price. Stelmakh said “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.”

Stelmakh reminded readers, in his post, of the ongoing trial period for the experiment and polls for the same had not yet closed. Stelmakh, through his work, helps to ease the issues faced by tallying the final votes with the sole purpose of the blockchain being able to create a binding record.