• United Russia, the country’s ruling party, has announced a new blockchain-based voting platform
• This platform is to be used for their upcoming primary elections

Politics and blockchain might not seem like an obvious mix, but it has been adopted in both Thailand and Japan. Now, it seems Russia is the newest place to get in on the action. United Russia, the ruling party of the country, has announced that it has launched a blockchain-based e-voting platform.

Integration with social networks

The initiative was unveiled as part of a new platform for their primaries voting. Their head of IT, Vyacheslav Sateyev, has said that the process of counting votes will now be done through blockchain as a means of ensuring increased efficiency and eliminating middlemen. He said:

“Candidates will be able to fill in their personal pages on this site, including posting news, videos, photos, distributing their pages. The personal account is now integrated with all social networks. We have also made an adaptive version of the site for mobile phones.”

Once the authorization process is completed by citizens on the web portal providing electronic state services, they will be able to vote through the platform. This makes the process easier and more accessible for everyday voters to engage in.

Elections on the Blockchain

While the use of blockchain for electoral proposes is relatively new, it has caught on rather quickly, and for good reason. Elections and politics in itself is very controversial, particularly in countries like Russia where it is believed that a lot of manipulation and government oversight unfairly influences the results of elections.

By making use of blockchain for this purpose, there is little to no margin of error and it is practically impossible for any tampering to take place. Should the small-scale trials that blockchain is currently being used in be successful, we could be looking at a future where elections being held on blockchains is commonplace all over the world and should that happen, it could spell the end of electoral manipulation and rigging altogether.

While the voting system seems to be slowly adapting to the use of blockchain, one aspect of politics that is still in limbo is the acceptance of Cryptocurrency as campaign donations, which is banned in some places and embraced in others.