DEG testing revealed only inattention of members of election commissions

The Central Election Commission (CEC) has completed testing and training of remote electronic voting (DEV) in seven regions, where it will be used during the elections from 9 to 11 September. According to the head of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, in total, about 67,500 people expressed their desire to “vote online” through the “Gosuslugi”, the Yaroslavl region is in the lead with 17,193 applications.

I took the opportunity to vote noticeably less.

At the time of writing, data for the Tomsk region and Kaluga, where local elections will be held, were not yet available, in five other regions 7275 voters took part in the testing, the turnout was 10.77%. According to the chairman of the specially created territorial election commission (TEC) of the DEG, Ilya Massukh, on average about 1,000 people voted in the region.

The Kaliningrad region – 2585 people, Yaroslavl – 1798 and Novgorod – 1051 became the leader in the number of voters.

Testing in Kaluga caused serious criticism: two ballots were issued and received at around 5:00 am, that is, before voting began, Grigory Melkonyants, a member of the election observation headquarters in Moscow, told Vedomosti. According to him, this transaction was noticed by the public.

Massukh told Vedomosti that a check was carried out on this fact, the reason was the human factor: “The Kaluga commission in the Elections GAS has not changed the voting dates, they have been standing since August 30th. In theory, it was possible to vote very early.” Massuh expressed confidence that in a real vote “this is unlikely to happen”: “There is more control. We will pay attention to it.”

According to Melkonyants, the questions posed to the DEG have generally remained the same: “When some anomalies occur, it is impossible to understand what it all means, we can only take the word of the creators of this platform, the program code has not yet been published to understand how transparently and correctly the system works. He noted that monitoring the DEG requires special knowledge and special software products to read transactions. Now the electoral commission has met the observers halfway and allowed the use of such programs, but only on the condition that the monitoring side develops them itself. According to him, United Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and New People have programs. Nevertheless, there will be no control recount either in Moscow or in the federal system, because the CEC procedure does not provide for it, Melkonyants stressed.

In Moscow, testing took place earlier. The capital uses its own platform for the DEG, not affiliated with the Central Election Commission.