Russian voters who do not believe that the 2024 presidential election was a fair affair can now cast their votes via a blockchain-secured and encrypted referendum via the Russia2024 app.
In this year's presidential election in March, tens of thousands of Russian nationals lined up to cast their votes at embassies around the world. Outside the embassy in The Hague, Netherlands, voters – many of them carrying protest banners – waited for hours to make their voices heard.
In theory. No one was surprised when Vladimir Putin was again declared the winner with 88% of the vote. Not necessarily because the result was directly faked, but as a result of years of fear-mongering propaganda, voter surveillance and the elimination of all real opponents.
Now these voters are being offered another way to express their dissatisfaction with their home country's seemingly immobile political status quo (and for blockchain technology to prove its utility beyond crypto).
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Russian opposition activist and former Pussy Riot lawyer Mark Fegyin created the blockchain-based referendum to challenge the legitimacy of this year's elections. It is now live on the new version Russia2024 app. The application, which was first launched in March, is based on the surveillance-free voting solution Freedom Tool from data protection software specialist RariLabs, based in Kiev, Ukraine.
Surveillance-proof protest route
Oppositional activism and political dissent in Russia are associated with persecution, imprisonment and even death. Despite the desire to speak out, whether against the war in Ukraine or against the increasingly oppressive political climate in the country, people remain silent because they fear – rightly – for their lives.
Furthermore, due to fears of surveillance, it is highly unlikely that voting and survey results reflect actual sentiment.
“Dissidents in Russia are becoming increasingly risky and public opinion is becoming increasingly difficult to track,” said Mark Feygin, initiator of Russia2024. “It is critical that we provide reliable, surveillance-proof options for protests and elections. Russia2024 and the underlying technology have made this possible.”
The Rariro division of RariLab developed Freedom Tool to give a voice to people living under authoritarian rule. It uses blockchain and zero-knowledge cryptography technology to ensure that authorities cannot track the platform's users even after they have verified their eligibility to vote. It is open source and royalty free and can be downloaded by anyone.
Lasha Antadze, co-founder of Rarimo provider RariLabs, said the implementation in Russia is an early example of how blockchain and zero-knowledge cryptography can meet the urgent global need for privacy technology.
Using the app, voters scan their biometric passports with their mobile phones, proving their citizenship and eligibility. They will then receive an anonymous voter ID card for polls and protest voting. So the app publishes votes directly on the blockchain, where they are tamper-proof.
Zero-knowledge cryptography allows one party to prove to another party that it has certain information without revealing any information other than the fact that it knows it.
The spark that faded
Mark Feygin is the former lawyer for the feminist punk group Pussy Riot, whose members stormed Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral in February 2012 and performed their anti-Putin “punk prayer.”
A judge then sentenced her to two years in prison for “hooliganism.” (One of their speakers recently received an eight-year prison sentence for posting about the war in Ukraine on social media.)
At the same time, over 100,000 people braved the Russian capital's freezing -18°C winds to express their outrage at what they said was a fraudulent and unfair electoral cycle that was supposed to result in the reinstatement of Vladimir Putin as president after a four-term deputy by Dmitri Medvedev.
The atmosphere was one of outrage and hope as the chant of “Russia without Putin” echoed through the streets. I know because I was there.
The feeling was that it could finally be time – enough was enough. There was an attitude of contempt, as if the people had seen through the deception and were fed up with their rulers patronizing them and blatantly lying to them. Unfortunately, as we saw, it wasn't to be.
Dissenting voices are slowly suffocating
Crude as they may be, the methods of repression and fear politics employed by Russia's ruling elite have proven effective in killing not only those who led a potentially significant wave of change, but also the belief that this change is even possible.
Unfortunately, the propaganda claiming that Putin is the only one who can prevent the country from falling into the same state of disarray and despair as in the 1990s has been incredibly successful.
It has managed to convince people that they are now doing well, when in reality they have only been fed fragments of the wealth that unscrupulous leaders and their cronies have captured for themselves.
Delving deeper into the psychological processes that laid the foundation for this is beyond the scope of this article. In short, Russia's authoritarian leaders have historically benefited from a collective cognitive framework that holds that people exist to serve those in power, rather than the other way around.
The Kremlin strikes back – with fake reviews
The work behind an app like Russia2024 is certainly not without danger, as the recent death of Alexei Navalny so painfully shows.
So far, the Kremlin has only blocked the app by filing a lawsuit that resulted in it being temporarily removed from the Apple Store. Moscow then tried to lower the app's rating by paying for negative reviews, a strategy revealed by a whistleblower.
Initiatives where individuals can have confidence that their privacy is protected and that authorities will not persecute them for their expression are crucial in a country where using the wrong word on Facebook can result in a 15-year prison sentence . If someone wants to use blockchain for this, I'll say no to it.
