Digital voting organizers report readiness for the Unified Voting Day
Chairman of the territorial election commission for remote electronic voting (TIC DEG) Oleg Artamonov and head of the department for improving territorial management and developing smart projects of the Moscow government Artem Kostyrko announced on Tuesday that electronic systems are fully ready to start voting. And if on a national scale online voting is still of an auxiliary nature, then in Moscow it is claiming the role of the main one: according to the Moscow City Electoral Commission, the number of city residents who expressed their desire to vote by paper amounted to tenths of a percent of the total number of voters.
On September 3, Oleg Artamonov announced the successful completion of the training of the federal platform of the DEG, which took place on August 28-29. According to him, 11% of all voters who applied for the DEG took part in the testing (there were almost 630 thousand of them in total). No significant technical or procedural problems were identified, and almost all the requests received were related to technical issues or problems with registering for the DEG due to inconsistencies in different databases, Mr. Artamonov reported during the final seminar on monitoring the DEG in the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation. In addition, the DEG territorial election commissions have already received lists of observers for online voting, who were sent by the public chambers. Their exact number will be known after all the data is verified, but it is possible to “say with confidence that the electoral associations have appointed observers in all regions,” Oleg Artamonov assured.
According to his data, as of September 2, almost 865 thousand people have already submitted an application to vote through the federal DEG system.
On September 5, the Central Election Commission will conduct a procedure for generating and dividing encryption keys for each of the five time zones where the regions that will use the DEG are located, said Dmitry Kuznetsov, Director of the PJSC Rostelecom Department and designer of the DEG PTC. According to him, the main innovation of the current procedure is signing the public encryption key with an electronic signature. This is done to exclude the possibility of its modification or substitution before loading it into the DEG PTC, since in this case it will be impossible to decrypt the voting results, Mr. Kuznetsov explained. The encryption key will traditionally be divided into seven parts, which will be kept by party representatives and the public until the voting results are summed up.
Also on September 5, the encryption keys for the electronic voting system will be divided in the Moscow City Electoral Commission (MGIK) — let us recall that the capital uses its own electronic voting system, and digital expression of will in the upcoming elections to the Moscow City Duma will be the main one. To vote with a paper ballot, it was necessary to submit a special application to the electoral commission by the evening of September 2 — in person or through the mos.ru portal. In total, about 13.5 thousand Muscovites did this, Olga Kirillova, chairperson of the MGIK, reported on Tuesday at a meeting of the Public Headquarters for Election Observation in Moscow. But taking into account those voting at home, military personnel, residents of pretrial detention centers and other categories of voters who do not have access to the DEG, the MGIK believes that the number of those who voted “by paper” could reach 200 thousand. “The most important task is to create all the conditions for the Moscow voter to be able to exercise his active electoral right,” said Ms. Kirillova. “We hope, both technically and from the point of view of theoretical preparation, that we have done everything possible to ensure that our three most important days of voting are calm, stable and professional.”
Artem Kostyrko, Head of the Department for Improving Territorial Management and Developing Smart Projects of the Moscow Government, reported that the electronic voting system has been tested and is ready for the elections. However, at the time of peak loads (traditionally they occur during the first 30-40 minutes of voting), "electronic queues" may arise, there is nothing to worry about, this is a normal procedure, warned Mr. Kostyrko. As reported at the headquarters meeting, about 12.7 thousand observers from the Public Chamber of Moscow will monitor the voting process. In addition, video surveillance will traditionally be conducted during the voting days.
