The Irish government wishes to eliminate dark money from election financing.

Ireland’s Ministry of Housing, Local Government, and Heritage is currently drafting regulations prohibiting political parties from accepting donations in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Local Government Minister Darragh O’Brien, who is responsible for elections and voting reform, convened a task force in January to recommend electoral integrity legislation. Protecting the country from cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns perpetrated by Russia-aligned actors was a particular concern. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine added to the country’s concerns.

According to O’Brien, the task force provided a “comprehensive set of recommendations to build a legal and digital bulwark against malign interference in our elections.”

Along with prohibiting cryptocurrency donations, the amended rules — which will be enforced by a newly created Electoral Commission — will tighten requirements for foreign contributions and empower the government to demand that content be removed from social media platforms.

Over the last decade, Russian hackers and intelligence agents have targeted Western governments and the US political infrastructure. Throughout the 2016 US presidential election, Russia purchased covert Facebook ads, and state actors posing as Americans flooded social media to enrage voters on both sides of the aisle.

According to the US Intelligence Community — which includes the CIA, FBI, and 15 other agencies — RT America, a state-funded news organization, was “the Kremlin’s primary international propaganda outlet.” Intelligence agencies were certain that RT, which also aired “The Keiser Report” with Bitcoin maximalist Max Keiser, was part of President Vladimir Putin’s fake news campaign.

Throughout the 2020 United States general election, Russian hackers breached several county government databases, gaining access to—but not altering—electoral data in some cases. The following year, the US Treasury sanctioned cryptocurrency addresses allegedly used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency to undermine election integrity.

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