Nearly 30,000 blockchain votes were recorded in Russian elections

Close to 30,000 votes were recorded on the blockchain during the Russian parliamentary elections in what appears to have been the biggest case of blockchain-based voting yet.

The blockchain component of the online voting platform was built by Waves Enterprise.

The voting concluded early yesterday, and according to the chief product officer of Waves Enterprise, Artem Kalikhov, everything went off without any hiccups.

In the Kursk oblast, 13,184 individuals had registered for online voting with 11,940 or 90.59% eventually recording their votes on the blockchain.

In the Yaroslavl oblast, 16,828 out of 18,834 who had registered, cast their vote online, which constituted a 91.54% turnout.

In total, 28,771 individuals recorded their votes on the blockchain.

If that happens, it would likely lead to several million votes recorded on the blockchain.

For voting in the two oblasts, the team was internally stress-testing the system for up to 1 million votes, so there appears to have been a lot of extra capacity.

The team behind Waves public blockchain has been working on a similar voting system that works in a permissionless environment.

Although blockchain technology possesses many valuable features that can be successfully applied to voting such as immutability, transparency, and anonymity, no technology can serve as a silver bullet against a rigged system.