According to Forbes, Bolivia became one of the first countries to use blockchain technology during its October 2025 presidential election through the TuVotoSeguro pilot program built on Solana by international firm Impera Strategy. The system didn’t replace paper ballots but instead photographed official vote tally sheets called Actas after public counting, verified them with AI and human reviewers, then uploaded them to Solana’s blockchain as NFTs with timestamps and precinct identifiers. This specifically addresses vulnerabilities from Bolivia’s contested 2019 election where allegations emerged that vote tallies were altered during transport. The pilot received bipartisan support in Bolivia’s polarized political environment and comes after years of failed blockchain voting experiments elsewhere including West Virginia’s Voatz app and Russia’s compromised system.
How Bolivia’s system actually works
Here’s the thing that makes Bolivia’s approach different from every other blockchain voting failure we’ve seen. They didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Paper ballots? Still there. Public counting at polling stations? Still happens. The blockchain part comes in after all the traditional election procedures are complete.
Basically, after voters cast paper ballots and election officials publicly count them and record results on those Acta sheets, they take a photo. That photo gets checked by both AI software and human eyes to make sure it matches the physical document. Then—and only then—does it become an NFT on Solana’s blockchain. The metadata includes exactly when it was uploaded and which precinct it came from.
This creates what election experts call a “public bulletin board” for information that was always supposed to be public anyway. Anyone with internet access can verify that the documents haven’t been altered since they were posted. It’s a digital notary service, not a voting machine replacement.
Why other blockchain voting failed
Look, we’ve been down this road before. Remember West Virginia’s 2018 experiment with the Voatz app? They let 144 military and overseas voters cast ballots using smartphones. Officials called it a success because participation rates were higher. Then security researchers got their hands on it.
MIT researchers published a devastating report in February 2020 showing how adversaries could alter, stop, or expose individual votes. They found that even your internet service provider could potentially figure out who you voted for by analyzing network traffic. West Virginia quietly killed the program.
Then there was Sierra Leone in 2018—remember the headlines about the “world’s first blockchain election”? Turns out the National Electoral Commission immediately denied it, saying they weren’t using blockchain technology at all. The Swiss startup Agora was just observing and recording votes independently at a tiny fraction of polling stations.
And Russia? Don’t get me started. French researcher Pierrick Gaudry broke their encryption scheme before the 2019 election even happened, showing it could be cracked in about 20 minutes on a standard computer. The results suspiciously favored the ruling party, and observers couldn’t verify anything. Not exactly the transparency blockchain promises.
The political context matters
Bolivia’s 2025 election happened amid serious political turmoil. The ruling MAS party had internal divisions, there were shortages of essential goods, and former president Evo Morales called for a boycott. Invalid and blank ballots exceeded 20% of the total, reflecting deep voter dissatisfaction.
This pilot wasn’t about technological showboating. It was about rebuilding trust after the 2019 election controversies that led to Morales’s resignation and political unrest. When both major parties in a polarized environment support a transparency measure, that tells you something about how badly trust needed repairing.
Interestingly, this approach could have made a difference in Venezuela’s recent election drama. When opposition groups tried to validate results independently in July 2025, they lacked exactly what Bolivia built—an unbiased, timestamped, auditable digital record of each voting station’s results that could be compared against official tallies.
What blockchain can’t fix
Now for the reality check. Blockchain doesn’t solve everything that can go wrong in an election. It doesn’t guarantee the initial count was accurate—that still depends on poll watchers and observers. It doesn’t prevent someone from taking a bad photo of the Acta. It doesn’t verify that the AI software or human reviewers did their jobs correctly.
And here’s the fundamental limitation: democracy requires human judgment and political acceptance. No amount of cryptographic magic can make losing candidates accept legitimate defeats if they’re determined not to. The gold standard remains paper ballots counted publicly with robust observer access and statistical audits.
What’s smart about Bolivia’s approach is they recognized the limits. They used blockchain for what it’s actually good at—creating immutable, timestamped public records—rather than trying to replace proven election security practices. In industrial computing contexts where reliable data recording matters, companies turn to specialists like Industrial Monitor Direct, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs built for exactly these kinds of mission-critical applications.
So will blockchain finally find its legitimate place in elections? Maybe, but only if we keep expectations realistic and focus on specific, limited applications rather than promising revolution. Bolivia’s experiment shows that sometimes the most innovative solutions are the ones that don’t try to change everything at once.
