Election results with DEG will be available immediately

The results of remote electronic voting (DEV) for the autumn elections of 2023 will be made public almost immediately after polling stations are closed. This was told to journalists by the deputy head of the department for promising solutions of the department of innovative technologies in the electoral process under the Central Election Commission, Ivan Kireev. According to him, this year the CEC adopted point changes in the procedure for holding. Now the results of the DEG will be held at the end of the elections in a particular region.

“Regional election commissions, in order to take into account the results of the DEG, were forced to wait for voting in all regions of the country. This year, 25 regions from five time zones will take part in the program,” Kireev said. He noted that the regions will be divided into appropriate groups.

In past years, the results of the DEG were summed up a few hours after completion. For example, in 2021, in the elections to the State Duma, the results from online polling stations were published only in the morning, after protocols from traditional polling stations.

Yury Satirov, director for digitalization of electoral processes at Rostelecom, explained that the system will have separate program keys for each time zone: “Let’s say, when Kamchatka finishes voting, the system will be able to collect a unique key, set the results. Each key collects only the data that is relevant to a particular vote, a particular time zone.”

In Moscow, there will be several such keys, the expert noted. According to Satirov, for three years the system “has not revealed any serious errors in the voting process.”

Satirov also announced the launch of a new form of DEG work: “Another innovation is the ability to launch the system so that it automatically starts every hour in each region, depending on the time zone.”

The DEG system has been developed since 2015. It was first used in the 2019 deputy elections in Moscow. Since 2020, it has been used at the federal level and is being implemented by Rostelecom by order of the CEC. In March 2022, an article regulating the DEG appeared in the 67th federal law “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights”. In 2022, elections were held in seven regions.

Elections in the regions this year will be held on September 8-10. Among them, 21 regions will elect governors, another five heads of regions will be approved by parliaments, and elections to legislative assemblies will be held in 20 regions.