Russian Government Advances Plan to Test Blockchain Technology-Based Local Voting Systems
T he 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-base...