Zug, a city in Switzerland known as the “Crypto Valley,” has successfully completed its first test of a local blockchain-based voting system.
As CoinDesk reported on June 11, the Swiss city launched an e-voting pilot platform built on a blockchain as part of the city’s efforts to embrace the technology. The voting process took place between June 25 and July 1, and stored both polling information and residents’ IDs on the system.
SWI swissinfo.ch, a news outlet owned by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, reported on Monday that the city’s head of communications, Dieter Müller, claimed that “the premiere was a success.”
Following the positive results, Müller said that “technical details” of the voting process will be evaluated over the coming months.
According to a press release from the city government on June 25, the goal of building this blockchain-based platform was to make the voting process “safer and less susceptible to unnoticed manipulation.”
The e-voting system was developed by Luxoft, a software company based in Zug, in partnership with the city and the department of computer science at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences.
At the time, Vasily Suvorov, Luxoft’s chief technology officer, said:
“There are concerns about electronic voting because voting is a fundamental mechanism for direct voting…. That’s why we believe that this technology should not belong to a single company. We will build the e-voting platform ‘Open Source’ so that people can understand what the technology is and how it works. We want to encourage more people to develop blockchain-based applications for governments worldwide.”
Swiss flags image via Shutterstock