UBIK Executes First Successful Official Blockchain Vote in Croatia

Croatia successfully executed the first formal blockchain-based vote during UBIK's yearly assembly. UBIK is Croatia's self regulating blockchain and cryptocurrency organization. The vote was registered on Croatia's Lisinski Testnet.

This year's UBIK assembly took place on April 24th and featured an election for the organization's president and board, proving the viability of blockchain-based voting and elections for small to medium governing bodies.

Blockchain Voting

UBIK's mission is to create a strong and focused community of blockchain enthusiasts and developers in Croatia and neighboring countries. To achieve this, powerful dissemination and distribution of information, education and knowledge of blockchain technology and its underlying mechanics is required. A blockchain-powered election was a key part of this overarching goal, especially considering voting is a popular topic in blockchain.

Thus, a simple platform was created for the voting process by Bitfalls.

Voting Mechanics

To make the process of voting as simple and approachable as possible, 50 whitelisted wallets were pre-loaded with LEth – Lisinski Ether – and given to the assembly attendees. The QR codes were at the same time burner wallets embedded in a regular browser and URLs to access the voting platform which contained two polls – one demo poll for learning how the system works, and another for the actual election of the candidate list.

The wallet was loaded via private key in the URL string, so the wallets were very much throwaway “burner” wallets, to be used once and once only. The distribution mechanics, however, were secure enough to prevent both voter apathy and Sybil attacks.

Clicking “Da” (Yes) initiated a transaction completely behind the scenes, signing it and sending it to the blockchain from a regular no-extra-wallet-needed web browser, without any additional interaction required by the user. The process was kept at an extremely user-friendly level, with absolutely no knowledge about blockchain required from the voters.

Interaction with the Lisinski blockchain explorer was only necessary if someone wanted to verify their transaction or prove that they voted a certain way. Every address' vote was visible in the blockchain explorer, but it was not known who specifically voted for what.

Vote Outcome

15 out of 21 attending members voted for candidate list #1. The votes were registered on the blockchain explorer at https://preglednik.lisinski.online/account/0x971d888b63b245bb8312bdc735de78c72b142db0.

Quorum was reached and the vote sealed a new Board and President. The goal of secure, anonymous, and Sybil-resistant voting was accomplished, and marks a first in Croatia and neighboring regions.