Blockchain Voting in Nepal: Could It Ever Work?

Nepal has been debating electronic voting for nearly two decades, and the conversation has resurfaced with fresh urgency ahead of the 2026 elections. Vote rigging, booth capturing, slow manual counting, and — increasingly — the question of how millions of Nepalis working abroad can vote at all, have pushed policymakers to look seriously at technology-based alternatives. Blockchain, with its promise of tamper-proof, independently verifiable records, keeps coming up in that conversation. But could it actually work for a national election in Nepal? The honest answer requires separating genuine potential from serious, unresolved risk.

Nepal's Long, Unfinished History With Electronic Voting

Nepal's first experiment with electronic voting dates back to the 2008 Constituent Assembly elections, when EVMs were piloted in Morang, Dhanusha, Kaski, Rolpa, and Kanchanpur. Observers considered the pilot successful, and former chief election commissioner Neil Kantha Uprety has noted the machines helped build public trust at the time. But those imported Indian machines had a practical limitation that ended up shelving the whole effort — they lacked enough buttons to represent Nepal's unusually high number of contesting parties, unlike India's more consolidated party system. Nepal continued developing its own EVMs and discussed their use again during the 2017 federal and provincial elections, but the country's major parties — Nepali Congress, the UML, and the CPN (Maoist Centre) — rejected the idea outright.

The debate has flared up again ahead of the 2026 elections. Communications and IT Minister Jagadish Kharel has publicly argued that electronic voting could modernise Nepal's electoral system at relatively low cost, pointing out that billions of rupees are still spent printing and transporting paper ballots. A live test came during the CPN-UML's internal convention in December, where electronic voting was used but ran into technical glitches and voter confusion — problems party organisers attributed to insufficient awareness campaigns and an underestimated number of participating voters, rather than a fundamental flaw in the technology itself.

The Overseas Voting Problem — Where Blockchain's Case Is Strongest

Nepal's single hardest voting logistics problem may be its millions of citizens working abroad, who currently have essentially no practical way to vote in national elections. The Nepal Policy Institute has recommended a hybrid model — combining embassy-based voting, postal voting, internet-based i-Voting, and multi-day in-country voting for returning migrants — specifically to address this gap ahead of the 2026 elections. The policy brief cites striking data from comparable countries: 98 percent of overseas registrants preferred internet voting during the Philippines' 2025 elections, and 85 percent of technology-assisted votes were cast online during Mexico's 2024 elections.

This is precisely the use case where blockchain-based voting has the clearest theoretical advantage. A remote voter casting a ballot from Qatar or Malaysia has no polling booth to physically observe — their only assurance that their vote was recorded correctly has to come from the system itself. A blockchain-based system can, in principle, let that voter verify a cryptographic receipt confirming their vote was correctly recorded and counted, without revealing who they voted for, while election officials and independent observers separately verify that the total tally matches every recorded vote — addressing the fundamental trust gap that pure postal voting or a closed online portal cannot solve on its own.

What Academic Research in Nepal Has Already Proposed

This isn't a purely foreign idea for Nepal. Researchers publishing through the Institute of Engineering's own journal have proposed a blockchain-interfaced secure e-voting system specifically designed to address Nepal's transparency and reliability concerns, with votes recorded on a blockchain to make them immutable and secure. More recent Nepali academic work has gone further, proposing a decentralised e-voting application built on the Ethereum blockchain, using smart contracts for tamper-proof vote recording, combined with facial recognition and voter ID verification to ensure only eligible voters participate — showing genuine, homegrown technical interest in solving Nepal's specific electoral integrity problems through blockchain rather than simply importing someone else's system.

The Real Risks That Can't Be Waved Away

Blockchain voting's core technical promise — an immutable, independently verifiable record — genuinely does address ballot tampering after a vote is cast. But it does not automatically solve several other problems that matter just as much for a fair election.

The privacy-verifiability tension. A voting system must let a voter verify their own vote was counted correctly, while making it mathematically impossible for anyone — including the voter themselves — to prove to a third party how they voted. This second property is essential for preventing vote-buying and coercion, and it is genuinely difficult to engineer well; a poorly designed blockchain voting system that makes votes too easily traceable back to individuals would be worse than useless.

Remote voting enables coercion in ways a polling booth doesn't. Whatever the underlying vote-recording technology, if a vote can be cast from home or a foreign dormitory rather than a supervised polling booth, there is no guarantee the voter cast it freely, uninfluenced by a family member, employer, or local power broker standing over their shoulder — a risk that exists independently of whether blockchain or any other technology secures the backend.

Infrastructure inequality. Blockchain-based or internet-based voting inherently favours voters with reliable internet access and digital literacy — exactly the gap that leaves rural and older voters at a disadvantage, a concern Nepal's own digital divide makes especially real, given the connectivity challenges already documented across its rural districts.

A single technical failure still has outsized consequences. As one recent academic paper studying blockchain EVM systems points out, existing blockchain voting proposals often still rely on third-party wallets and managed servers for voter validation — meaning some centralised components frequently remain in the system regardless of what's called "blockchain," and any single point of failure in those components undermines the trustlessness the technology is meant to provide.

What a Responsible Path Forward Looks Like

The realistic, defensible approach for Nepal is incremental rather than a single leap to blockchain-based national voting. Nepal Policy Institute's own recommendation reflects this: a hybrid model blending embassy voting, postal voting, and internet voting, rather than betting the entire overseas vote on one untested technology channel. Any internet or blockchain-based voting component should launch first for a narrow, lower-stakes use case — overseas voters in a limited pilot, for instance — with independent cybersecurity audits and transparent public reporting before any consideration of scaling to in-country general elections.

Nepal's own EVM history offers a cautionary lesson here too: the 2008 pilot succeeded technically but still got shelved, not because the machines failed, but because Nepal's specific political context — an unusually high number of contesting parties, and deep-seated political distrust between parties over who controls vote-counting — created obstacles that no amount of good engineering alone could resolve. A blockchain voting system faces exactly the same political trust hurdle: even a perfectly designed system will not get adopted if Nepal's political parties don't collectively trust the process by which it was built, audited, and deployed.

The Bottom Line

Blockchain voting could genuinely help solve one of Nepal's hardest electoral problems — giving its enormous overseas population a verifiable way to vote — but it is not a plug-and-play fix for Nepal's broader electoral integrity concerns, and several of its trickiest problems (coercion, privacy, the digital divide, residual centralised components) are not solved by blockchain alone. The technology is worth serious, well-funded research and narrow, carefully audited pilots. A full national rollout, without first resolving Nepal's deeper political trust questions around who controls and audits the system, would be getting ahead of what any voting technology — blockchain included — can responsibly deliver.