Guerrilla Elections and Censorship-Proof Identity, Eastern European Style

Background

What if authoritarian states could hold real elections? — Guerrilla elections and censorship-proof identity, Eastern European style

A few days ago I shared a news story about a Taiwanese citizen whose national ID number and personal data had been leaked. They tried to get a new ID number issued and were denied, and are now fighting an administrative lawsuit. In the comments, a friend asked whether passports might serve as a substitute for national ID cards. Someone else pointed out that under Taiwanese law, passports are tied to your national ID number, so that’s a dead end.

I think they were actually grappling with two different layers of the problem. Honestly, for any individual citizen, a passport is still part of what you might call the “sovereign leverage” apparatus — it’s not compulsory, it costs money to apply for, and nowhere near one hundred percent of people hold one (I looked it up: the penetration rate hovers around sixty percent). Still, Taiwan remains recognized by the international passport organizations, which means we can use our passports to travel to (almost) anywhere in the world. We’re within the ICAO framework. As a piece of international civic identity, the Taiwanese passport is a kind of leverage that, paradoxically, carries no leverage at all.

But on the far side of the Eastern European continent, people have been thinking outside the box — specifically, from the vantage point of exile. What good is a passport when you’ve fled your own country? Whether your homeland is run by pragmatists or ideologues, authoritarian or democratic, it still issues passports so citizens can cross borders (or be prevented from doing so). And so there exists a cohort of Eastern Europeans — Russian political exiles, Romanians, even Iranians — who have escaped their countries but still carry passports from their former homelands. That slender document maintains a kind of umbilical connection to the nation they left behind. At the very least, it proves they were once citizens.

Some organizations have seized on this fact, wrapping “censorship-resistant” cypherpunk technology — especially blockchain and cryptographic tools — around passport-based identity verification, enabling a form of guerrilla democracy: opposition referendums, protest votes, all of it untraceable.

I met Lasha, one of Rarimo’s founders, briefly in Argentina. He made quite an impression — a genuinely memorable Eastern European troublemaker. (Fortunately, both our passports still got us through Argentine customs.) This piece centers on Rarimo’s solution and its derivative, the aptly named Freedom Tool.

I believe almost nobody in Taiwan has covered this yet. Vitalik himself has said that if you want to follow developments in this space, Rarimo is the first name you need to know. I won’t dwell on the technical architecture here. What interests me are the actions these tools have enabled — efforts that feel more like art performances or guerrilla social protests, but remixed with a “privacy-enhanced flavor.” Genuinely delightful.

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A quick primer: Lasha and his team built an entire toolkit plus an app. Download the Rarimo App, scan your passport’s NFC chip, and the system verifies its authenticity while extracting basic attributes — your nationality, your age, and so on.

None of this is particularly novel. Plenty of services do similar things — South Korean immigration, or the once-buzzy Worldcoin, for instance.

What’s truly interesting is that the app can generate, right on your phone, a “proof of truth” — a zero-knowledge proof (ZK proof) — without ever touching a government or corporate server.

When you perform operations on the blockchain, these proofs become leaves woven into a verification tree. Validators only need to check a string of hashed data from this tree. They can confirm that a real person took a real action, without ever knowing which passport did what.

This creates a couple of compelling scenarios. First, you can vote — or do anything analogous — without your identity being exposed. Anonymous balloting, achieved. Second, you become nearly impossible to track, and the whole system resists censorship. If some government decides this little democratic experiment violates national security laws and tries to take the vote down — well, good luck. It’s essentially impossible.

Their only recourse would be the old-fashioned kind: physically going after the people who launched the experiment. But the vote is already underway, every ballot already inscribed on the blockchain, permanent and immutable.

Observations

These aren’t just thought experiments. Over the past two years, they’ve actually landed, producing a handful of genuinely fascinating real-world cases.

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The most straightforward example is Freedom Tool.

Russia

After Putin secured his fifth term, exiled opposition figure Mark Feygin used Rarimo’s Freedom Tool to launch “Russia2024,” an unofficial referendum. Feygin is a former lawyer who defended many civil-rights activists — Pussy Riot among them — and has been running exile media since the war in Ukraine began.

With Russia2024, anyone holding a Russian passport — whether still inside the country or living in exile — could cast a vote. Thanks to zero-knowledge proofs, votes were untraceable and couldn’t be cast twice. Thanks to the blockchain, they couldn’t be tampered with.

The referendum carried zero legal force. It was pure public expression, a declaration of collective sentiment. But in a high-risk political environment, it established a pathway for voicing popular will whose results were visible yet whose participants were impossible to identify and punish.

During the whole affair, the Russian government couldn’t take the platform down. The best they managed was to send a letter to Apple’s App Store claiming the app impersonated a state entity and violated terms of service, demanding its removal. Genuinely funny, and genuinely telling.

Lasha put it this way: “Decentralized voting and the Freedom Tool are designed so that even if you want to attack them, you can’t. There’s no single point to strike, to block, or to eliminate. You can’t hack it the way you’d steal a Bitcoin private key.” He added: “Anonymous letters from Russian cryptography professors have contributed enormously to our work. This is, in essence, a wartime defense technology.”

One more thing: Rarimo is currently based in Kyiv. It is, fundamentally, a cypherpunk project built with the Russia-Ukraine situation as its founding premise.

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Iran

As we crossed from 2025 into 2026, Iran has been anything but calm. Massive protests that started as outrage over economic collapse have pivoted toward Khamenei’s regime itself. Whether the regime survives this particular storm remains to be seen.

But back in 2024, someone in Iran anonymously launched “Iranians Vote,” also built on the Freedom Tool. Voting ran for six months starting in June 2024, and the results are visible on the Gnosis blockchain — open for both the government and the public to inspect. But nobody can see who voted for whom, or even who voted at all.

The registration and voting process was identical to the Russian case described above, which means the regime cannot punish citizens simply for registering to participate.

Reflections

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Georgia

Georgia has experienced severe democratic backsliding in recent years, with authoritarian-style elections making a comeback under the ruling party “Georgian Dream” and its founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili.

The United National Movement (UNM), Georgia’s main opposition party, adopted the same technology in 2024 to launch “United Space” — again using passports verified through zero-knowledge proofs to create private, verifiable digital identities.

United Space’s design is more elaborate, more speculative. UNM used polls and votes to build engagement, then layered on a points system to incentivize participation — what they call “Engage-to-earn.” It’s not unlike countries where you’re fined for not voting, or where casting a ballot unlocks certain civic benefits. Down the road, these points are meant to tie into a quasi-universal basic income and public services. The catch, of course, is that the opposition would need to win first. (Which, at present, is not in the cards — they collected 210,895 votes in 2024, roughly ten percent.)

Because Georgia’s voter turnout is low and public trust in government even lower, the opposition’s strategy is to use verifiable privacy as a trust-building mechanism: get people comfortable enough to join the United Space app, participate in opinion polls and policy discussions, and create a space where “verifiable anonymity” lets them express their views without fear.

Their most ambitious vision resembles “liquid democracy” — draft legislation would need to reach a threshold of public support before entering parliament, and voters could delegate their votes. Paired with on-chain transparency and censorship resistance, it’s a bid to make democracy more resilient.

The name, I have to say, is rather good.

Another Rarimo co-founder, Kitty Horlick, put it this way: “This is a form of defense tech. If you can build a society where it’s easier to express dissent, then you may be able to prevent authoritarian regimes from taking hold in the first place — and the atrocities that follow.”

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Emerging technologies can look intimidating at first glance, especially when they involve cryptography that reads like ancient scripture. But working backward from these real-world cases, the underlying logic is surprisingly simple. And these scrappy guerrilla projects — the ones that look like they’ll never succeed — turn out to be the perfect vehicles for storytelling, the kind that lets people around the world grasp, with clarity, what’s actually at stake.

A digital identity that is truly private, genuinely untraceable, yet resistant to abuse — that remains a tantalizing holy grail. But these services are showing the first light of dawn, beginning to mature. There is a real opportunity here to lay the groundwork for the digital democracies of the future.

What’s most striking, though, is that these passport-based experiments in anonymous digital expression have emerged, almost simultaneously, in authoritarian regions.

Innovation is born at the margins of resistance. That’s not just a saying. Look at Eastern Europe. Then think about Taiwan.

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By the way, I also used the Freedom Tool to set up a fake Taiwanese test election: Tofu President versus Denken President. If you’re curious, give it a try — it’s a decent way to get a feel for how the whole thing works under the hood.