Despite the success of the Russian elections, this platform is for business clients.
With the public release of its blockchain voting system for firms and board governance, Waves Enterprise, a business-focused flip of the Waves project, has made a significant step forward.
The Waves method uses blockchain technology to record and tally votes with full cryptographic safeguards. We will utilize homomorphic encryption to count votes without revealing voter identities.
During local and parliamentary elections in Russia, they tested the technique.
According to Chief Product Officer Artem Kalikhov, those elections employed a voting system built in partnership with Rostelekom, which is based on an identical cryptographic protocol but has several significant distinctions. It uses Russian cryptography, numerous identification, and anonymization technologies and alters the voting procedure.
Despite Kalikhov’s claim that Brazilian authorities are considering blockchain voting, the current product aimed at business settings and board voting, a market Waves estimates $100 million globally.
A wide range of target consumers made the platform more accessible. The platform did not allow third parties to connect to and check the blockchain nodes during the Russian elections. He claims the commercial version runs on Waves Enterprise Mainnet, a private yet public blockchain.
The Voting Platform
The platform includes several anti-fraud measures during voting and tallying. With blockchain and cryptographic signatures, Kalikhov claims the vote cannot be changed or erased after being recorded. Using homomorphic encryption, he explained, allows for automatic election results collecting without decrypting each ballot, protecting voter privacy. With a distributed vital generation mechanism and many encryption servers, no one can interpret the results or review individual votes before the vote.
Overall, cryptography, blockchain, and a system of checks and balances attempt to decrease election fraud. As other methods have shown, blockchain does not eliminate vulnerabilities or potential backdoors.
The platform is only as good as the voter registration process. Ballots cast in the identities of deceased individuals, felons, or otherwise illegal voters are typical examples of election fraud. Other examples include paying or bullying people to vote for a specific candidate or creating loopholes that allow the same person to vote several times.
Kalikhov claims that voters are enrolled using public and private keys. Smart contracts keep track of qualified voters using their public keys, while their private keys stay on their devices. The approach allows voters to amend their vote preference before the election for anti-fraud purposes.
But, according to Kalikhov, the system cannot protect users’ devices from hacking, loss, or user-initiated vital transfers. While the voting software aims to protect private keys, users should still use antivirus software. Additionally, they keep up with system upgrades.
According to Kalikhov, the team plans to add technologies that verify each user’s identity in the future. However, the existing system may be adequate in business settings – extra ballot fraud is more likely to occur in non-governmental elections.
