Voting and blockchain have been a controversial couple, but Moscow seems determined to use the technology for a national referendum involving President Vladimir Putin.

Russia will vote on the modification of its constitution, adopted in 1993, on July 1. The main issue is whether the Russian president should remain in power for more than the current limit of two consecutive six-year terms.

Most of the country will use traditional ballots, but residents of Moscow and the Nizhny Novgorod region will be able to vote electronically and, at least in the case of Muscovites, have them recorded on a blockchain. 

According to an official page dedicated to electronic voting, the Moscow Information Technology Department, which is working on the technical solution, plans to use Bitfury's open source corporate blockchain, Exonum. 

“Blockchain technology works in proof of authority mode,” says the page in Russian. “A smart contract for the ballot register will record the votes in the system, and when the vote is finished, it will decode them and publish them in the blockchain system.” 

The Information Systems Department did not respond to CoinDesk's request for comment by press time. The Bitfury spokesperson declined to comment on the company's involvement in the project.

"Blockchain-based voting is one of the most important applications of Exonum and blockchain technology as a whole," said the spokesperson. “We have nothing to share at the moment, but we will keep in touch with future announcements.”

According to several people familiar with the electronic voting project, the company that built the solution for the Moscow authorities was Kaspersky Lab, the famous provider of antivirus software that has turned to consulting in the blockchain space in recent years. A Kaspersky spokesperson declined to comment.

Bumpy road

Moscow's previous experience with chain voting has not been fluid.

In September, residents of several districts of Moscow were able to vote electronically in city council elections. When the system code was published, French security researcher Pierrick Gaudry showed that it could be easily hacked. When the vote was over, one of the losing candidates criticized the system, saying that the offline results were not consistent with those submitted electronically. 

Roman Yuneman, an independent candidate who ran in municipal elections, published a report describing the weaknesses of the system put in place by the Moscow authorities. According to the report, the vote was down almost 30% of the time, and the Yuneman team received 70 complaints from people who could not vote electronically.

Russian media Meduza wrote that the private key for decoding votes was written into one of the transactions and could be easily retrieved, which helped to understand how particular people voted. At the same time, around 12,000 electoral records were leaked through the system, reported Meduza.

In addition, all data have been collected on servers belonging to the Moscow authorities and were under their full control, wrote Yuneman. Independent observers have not been able to verify the authenticity of the vote count, and in a neighborhood, the results offline and online have shown opposite results. 

Low confidence

"Electronic voting poses many problems, even without a blockchain, and this was clearly demonstrated during the elections in Moscow," said Sergey Tikhomirov, blockchain researcher and doctoral student at the University of Luxembourg. 

“There was no technical way to observe it and the poll administrators could forge the data at any time. And, unlike paper newsletters, counterfeiting in this case leaves no trace, "he said.

Blockchain-based voting has also proven difficult to break in other countries.

One of the best known blockchain voting apps, Voatz, was blown up after several pilot tests, with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security pointing out the vulnerabilities of the app. MIT researchers too. 

Yet governments around the world have experimented with this concept, and blockchain voting tests are underway in Thailand, South Korea, Sierra Leone and India.

Nir Kshetri, professor of management at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, wrote in October that despite hope that the blockchain could make elections more transparent and fairer, “there is still no evidence be better to prevent electoral fraud ”.

In the end, it is the people in power who decide on the design of a blockchain voting system and who will have access to it. Technology does not solve the problem of trust in the political system, said Tikhomirov.

"If people trust the electoral system as such, any method of voting would work, even if electronics are more risky anyway. But if there is no trust, electronic voting makes it even more difficult to verify whether the counting of votes was fair or not, "he said.

Russia has a history of falsified election results at all levels over the past decade, which has sparked a national movement of volunteer election observers who report irregularities in voting during each electoral cycle.