Elections in Ukraine May Run on Ethereum’s Blockchain

Technologies
11.02.2016

KYIV, UKRAINE, 02.11.2016 – Memorandum concerning creation of E-vox, Ethereum-based electronic election system, was signed. The system in question will be used for holding election at any level, varying from municipal councils to the national parliament.

Presently, the system is an Ethereum-based smart contract prototype taking into account Ukrainian political peculiarities. The prototype was developed by Ambisafe.

According to Andrei Zamovskiy, CEO of Ambisafe, the system wil not employ colored coins, as smart contracts are preferrable under the country’s legal requirements. The e-Vox system is intended for perceiving votes as votes, and cannot use hybrid solutions that represent actual votes, like colored coins.

“We kick off the experiment with generally unregulated kinds of voting, i.e. petitions and advisory votes. As soon as the technology is worked off, the legislation will be respectively amended. The political actors participating in the negotiations and signing of the memorandum fuel our confidence that regulation won’t be an issue,” Zamovskiy said.

The petitions will be applicable without limitations both at local and national levels. However, initially the voting system will be subject to testing in some Ukrainian town coincils, namely in towns of Kyiv and Odessa oblasts. E-vox is intended for nation-wide introduction following the successful completion of testing.

“Presently, it’s a non-government initiative we intend to turn into irreversible processes for the state and the society,” said Oleksii Konashevych, one of the project’s coordinators.

Coordinating the project are Oleksii Konashevych (a group for e-democracy reforms) and David Kiziria (strategic development executive at Innovative Systems Institute). The memorandum’s signing parties include Ambisafe, Vareger Group, Bitcoin Foundation Ukraine, Titanovo, OPIR.ORG, NGO, and Distributed Lab, with anyone willing to join is welcome. Anyone who feels like it, may accede to the memorandum at the project’s official website.

According to the document, the undertaking parties shall:
Create a strategic partnership aimed at development of a decentralized, transparent, and accessible system for collective decision-making with blockchain-based tools;
Invest any efforts as they may be required to create an electronic system of voting based on blockchain technology dubbed e-Vox;
Cooperate internally and with third parties for the benefit of the project.
Stick to the essential aim of the e-Vox project:
provide reliable e-democracy tools to people;
minimize or eliminate any third party influence on voting process or decision-making;
publish the project’s source code under MIT x11 license.
The voting system will be developed for:
primaries and other political processes;
electronic petitions, eletronic plebiscite, and referendums;
electronic elections and other competitive selections;
elections of local and parliamentary representatives;
any communities and other purposes as the case may be.
Be open to any cooperation with developers, investors and users of e-Vox meeting the objectives of present Memorandum.

The full text of the signed memorandum is available at the project’s official website.

Ukraine remains the Eastern European leader in integrating blockchain-based technologies in public services. As ForLog reported earlier, a blockchain-based voting system will be deployed in the town of Vyshgorod ten miles away from Kyiv, as a part of public services platform development. In autumn 2015, a blockchain-based system for state property auctions was announced in another Ukrainian city of Odessa.

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