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In October 2025 Bolivia became one of the first countries to use blockchain technology during a presidential election. But before visions of people voting with their crypto wallet dance through your head, understand what actually happened: Bolivia didn’t reinvent voting.
It photographed paper ballots and posted the images to a public ledger. But why?
Bolivia’s pilot program, TuVotoSeguro, is built on the Solana blockchain by international firm Impera Strategy. TuVotoSeguro used human input and AI-assisted image validation to publish official vote tallies at a limited set of polling booths.
After voters cast paper ballots at polling stations, election officials counted votes publicly and recorded results on a single sheet called an Acta. These Actas were then photographed, verified by both AI software and human reviewers, and uploaded to Solana’s blockchain as NFTs with metadata including timestamps and precinct identifiers.
The system addresses a specific vulnerability from Bolivia’s contested 2019 election, when allegations emerged that vote tallies were altered during transport from polling stations to central counting facilities. By creating an immutable public record of each Acta immediately after counting, the pilot aims to make post-count manipulation detectable.
The pilot received bipartisan support in Bolivia’s polarized political environment, with both major parties recognizing its potential to rebuild public confidence after years of election controversies.
This approach differs fundamentally from blockchain voting systems that have failed elsewhere. Bolivia didn’t replace paper ballots, didn’t ask voters to use smartphones or apps, and didn’t introduce new points of failure into the voting process itself. The blockchain component functions as a public bulletin board for information that was already intended to be public.
Bolivia’s pilot arrives after a decade of blockchain election projects that promised transformation.
West Virginia pioneered blockchain voting in U.S. federal elections during 2018, allowing 144 military and overseas voters to cast ballots using the Voatz mobile app. Officials declared it a success based on higher participation rates. Then came the security analyses.
In February 2020, MIT researchers published a devastating report identifying vulnerabilities that would allow adversaries to alter, stop, or expose individual votes. They discovered that a passive network adversary like an internet service provider could potentially recover a user’s secret ballot through side-channel attacks analyzing packet lengths. West Virginia discontinued the program shortly after.
An independent audit by Trail of Bits, commissioned by Voatz itself, confirmed MIT’s findings. They identified 79 vulnerabilities, with one-third rated “high severity,” and found that “the blockchain doesn’t actually extend to the mobile client”, contradicting marketing claims about end-to-end blockchain protection.
Other attempts fared no better. Sierra Leone generated worldwide headlines in March 2018 when media reported it conducted the “world’s first blockchain election” using Swiss startup Agora’s platform. Sierra Leone’s National Electoral Commission immediately denied this, with Chief Electoral Commissioner Mohamed Conteh stating “the NEC has not used, and is not using blockchain technology in any part of the electoral process”. Agora was merely an observer that recorded votes at 280 of 11,200 polling stations in parallel with the official paper-based election.
Russia represents the only ongoing large-scale deployment, but it exemplifies the technology’s potential for abuse rather than transparency. French researcher Pierrick Gaudry publicly broke the encryption scheme for Moscow’s 2019 blockchain voting system before the election even occurred, demonstrating it could be cracked in approximately 20 minutes on a standard computer. Election monitoring organization Golos reported that observers could not download blockchain transactions or verify system integrity, and results suspiciously favored the ruling party.
The pattern repeats: initial enthusiasm, security revelations, quiet discontinuation.
On July 28, 2025 Venezuela gained global headlines for organizing a grassroots initiative in an attempt to validate the Presidential election results of Nicholas Maduro and Edmundo Gonzalez. Voting records similar to those saved on the blockchain in Bolivia were collected from around the country of Venezuela. They were counted independently and results indicated the opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia may have won the popular vote.
What was critically missing in this initiative was an unbiased, timestamped, auditable digital record of the voting results of each voting station that can be compared against official results. This is precisely the thinking behind the design of Bolivia’s TuVotoSeguro organizing and anchoring voting station results on blockchain.
Bolivia’s 2025 election was held amid internal party divisions within the ruling Movimiento al Socialismo and widespread dissatisfaction over shortages of essential goods like gasoline, diesel, food, and medicine. Former president Evo Morales, barred from running, called for a boycott and urged supporters to cast null ballots.
The first-round results ended two decades of left-wing dominance and produced the country’s first-ever presidential runoff. The ruling MAS suffered historic losses, retaining only two seats in the Chamber of Deputies and losing all Senate seats. Invalid and blank ballots exceeded 20 percent of the total, reflecting deep voter dissatisfaction.
In this environment, any mechanism that increases transparency and reduces opportunities for fraud accusations serves a legitimate purpose. The 2019 election controversies, which contributed to Morales’s resignation and political unrest, demonstrated the stakes of election legitimacy in Bolivia.
The blockchain pilot addressed this specific context. It didn’t promise to revolutionize voting or eliminate all fraud possibilities. It created a public record of information that should already be public, making one particular form of manipulation, altering Actas in transit, more difficult and detectable.
What does blockchain actually provide in Bolivia’s system? An immutable, timestamped public record accessible to anyone with internet access. The NFT format allows independent verification that documents haven’t been altered after posting.
What doesn’t it solve? Everything before the photograph. The accuracy of the initial count depends on poll watchers and observers, not blockchain. The integrity of the photograph depends on the person taking it. The verification process depends on AI software and human reviewers functioning correctly. Device security, voter privacy, and vote verification remain unchanged from traditional paper ballot systems.
A conventional database with cryptographic audit trails could provide similar functionality, but the blockchain simply adds distributed storage and eliminates dependence on a single server operator.
Bolivia’s blockchain experiment deserves credit for its limited scope and specific focus. By not attempting to replace paper ballots or handle actual voting, it avoids the most serious security vulnerabilities that have plagued other blockchain election projects. Posting what already should be public information to a public ledger creates transparency without introducing new attack vectors into the voting process itself.
The more important lesson concerns the limits of technical solutions to political problems. Bolivia’s 2019 election controversies stemmed from institutional weakness and political polarization, not technological deficiency. No amount of blockchain can substitute for trustworthy election administration, transparent processes, and losing candidates who accept legitimate defeats.
That being said, technology can support these elements by making information more accessible, reducing opportunities for undetectable manipulation, and providing additional verification mechanisms. But it cannot create trust where political will to accept democratic outcomes is absent.
Paper ballots counted publicly, with robust observer access and statistical audits, remain the gold standard according to election security experts across the political spectrum. These methods provide software independence, verifiable paper trails, and resilience against systematic attacks that could compromise millions of votes simultaneously.
The blockchain dream of algorithmic trust encounters a hard reality in elections: democracy requires human judgment, institutional legitimacy, and political acceptance. No distributed ledger can provide those things.
