Romania is using blockchain to count presidential electoral votes today

The Permanent Electoral Authority in Romania (ROAP—Romania Autoritatea Electorală Permanentă) is using blockchain technology to count and validate presidential electoral votes on November 24.

Ovidiu Damian, a Romanian blockchain developer at Pi Squared, reported the news on X earlier this morning. “Romania casually using blockchain tech to ensure election integrity,” said Damian, sharing a link and joking it is “probably nothing.”

With that, people from all over the world can follow the transactions in a public ledger, live in a dashboard at ROAP’s official website. As of this writing, 83859 blocks containing cryptographically verified votes have already been added to the blockchain.

Romania’s Special Telecommunication Service (STS—Serviciul de Telecomunicații Speciale, in Romanian) also signs the website together with the electoral authority. According to an STS announcement, the system uses the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), composed of nodes located in 27 European countries.

“This modern technological implementation aims to strengthen the resilience of the Romanian electoral system, by ensuring traceability and increasing trust in data integrity. Moreover, for the first time, the digital fingerprints of this data will also be anchored in the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) blockchain network developed by the European Commission, thus ensuring an additional level of security and traceability.”