The government of Russia has announced that it is advancing its plans to conduct a pilot test on the effectiveness of Blockchain technology in improving the local voting systems in the country. The government further claimed that the technology will make its ongoing Active Citizen program more transparent.

In its public statement released on Dec. 4, 2017, the government said that it has already developed a pilot system for the monitoring of votes during elections through the Blockchain.

Part of the statement reads:

"The introduction of this technology will make the voting in the [Active Citizen initiative] even more open: it will be difficult to say that the administration incorrectly interprets the answers, changes the results of the voting when the citizens themselves can verify this information."

Moreover, the government has also made the code behind the pilot program open-source, by publishing it on the web-based control repository hosting service GitHub.

Previous efforts by the government on Blockchain technology

In 2016, Russian officials have announced that they were assessing the possible use of a technology in order to lessen or eliminate the risk of fraud during voting on city management issues.

They claimed that the potential project would be a part of the government’s “Active Citizen” e-government program. The initiative covers several areas in which Blockchain is being explored, including the government’s new land registry system.

Private sector showed interest in Blockchain

Despite the uncertainties of whether it will be successful and implemented in real life, the announced pilot program has attracted the interest of the private sector. Among the parties is the country’s central securities depository, which already tested a Blockchain-based proxy voting system in 2016.

Under the system, stockholders are allowed to issue proxy votes on corporate decisions.