In 2021 Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation updated its list of requirements to the meetings of dissertation councils, referring to the tense pandemic situation worldwide. The updated list includes granting an option of remote voting under certain rules to all the council members who can’t or don’t want to participate in the meetings offline.

Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Science has chosen WE.Vote e-voting service for organizing distant votings.

One of the basic requirements of Higher Attestation Commission to e-voting is keeping ballot secrecy. In WE.Vote electronic ballots are encrypted right after their filling and never get decrypted, even while tallying results. This is possible thanks to homomorphic encryption. Meanwhile, any voter can check the blockchain history and make sure that it includes transactions with his public key. This guarantees that his vote was calculated and not falsified — data immutability is ensured by blockchain.

“As a leading scientific organization, we were looking for a high tech, modern solution to organize e-votings. After checking a number of different e-voting services, we have chosen WE.Vote blockchain service by Waves Enterprise. This is a rather complicated instrument, from the mathematical side as well, and we were pleasantly surprised by its speed and reliability, and what’s more important — by its ease of use.” Vitalii Atapin, Chief of Postgraduate Studies, Steklov Mathematical Institute.

Any e-voter is just one click away from his ballot. He doesn’t need any extra registration, because for every voting he receives just a single link via e-mail. And he can vote either from his computers or mobile device, thanks to the easy and flexible WE.Vote interface.

WE.Vote was successfully used in the e-votings of dissertation councils for up to 21 members. In the future, the institute will extend the application of WE.Vote for e-voting in other councils and commissions which solve important issues of the scientific organization.