Remote voting on the district improvement held for the first time in St Petersburg with the help of the blockchain development of the University
The administration of the Vasileostrovsky District of St Petersburg has recently held a vote on priority elements for the area improvement of the Smolenka River Embankment. To make a decision, the remote voting system "CryptoVeche" was used. The system had been developed by the Distributed Ledger Technologies Centre at St Petersburg University. It is based on blockchain technologies and allows secret and open remote voting in organisations of any scale.
There were 1,202 residents of the Vasileostrovsky district and other districts of St Petersburg who took part in the voting by secret ballot. The administration notes that the speed of decision-making using the remote voting format has increased, and the need for a long process of collecting and analysing incoming information has disappeared. The platform analyses the data and gives the result automatically.
Recently, the scope of application of blockchain technologies has been actively expanding. When using such services for voting purposes, important elements of remote elections are preserved, i.e. confidentiality, reliability and security.
Dmitriy Shishmakov, Head of the Distributed Ledger Technologies Centre of St Petersburg University
‘Among the advantages of CryptoVeche, we can highlight: the speed of decision-making, fast and convenient integration, which does not require the introduction of the programme into the organisation’s system; and the ability to automatically generate protocols and documentation with voting data’, said Dmitriy Shishmakov, Head of the Distributed Ledger Technologies Centre of St Petersburg University.
The peculiarity of the voting system based on blockchain technologies is reliability and objectivity. The results cannot be rigged, so any remote elections become transparent. For the district administration, this is an opportunity to hold public hearings with the participation of residents, particularly in conditions of restrictive measures aimed at preventing the spread of coronavirus disease.
In addition to government agencies, the remote voting system can be used at universities, banks, industrial enterprises, and construction companies. The number of voters and the number of votes is unlimited.
Today, more than 100 scientific organisations use CryptoVeche.
Universities use this system for voting at academic and dissertation councils, elections of university lecturers, heads of structural divisions, and delegates at conferences to name just a few.
CryptoVeche blockchain system was developed in 2020 by the Distributed Ledger Technologies Centre at St Petersburg University. The Centre is also developing other services based on distributed ledger technologies, for example, the document management system ‘Eloris’ or the intellectual property items management system "Edemes".