Moscow to share unnecessary deficit – Kommersant

The Central Election Commission (CEC) will hand over to the regions 2,000 ballot processing complexes (KOIB), which will no longer be needed in Moscow. New terminals for electronic voting will be used in the capital this year, and the regions are experiencing a shortage of KOIBs, because due to Western sanctions, the CEC could not increase their number. The CEC specialists upgraded the complexes of an earlier model to modern models, while the chairman of the commission, Ella Pamfilova, promised to continue working on increasing the number of KOIBs in the electoral system.

At a meeting on May 17, the Central Election Commission distributed 2,000 KOIBs of the 2017 model among the regions, which Moscow gave away. The fact that there were problems with the production of KOIBs became known at the beginning of the year. At a meeting at the CEC on February 2, Ella Pamfilova said that the commission could not yet increase the number of KOIBs due to Western sanctions. As Alexander Sokolchuk, head of the Federal Informatization Center at the CEC, said, Russia uses the 2017 and 2010 KOIB models: the latter are already outdated, but so far they cannot be replaced with newer ones, so they have to be kept alive.

Moscow used KOIBs more actively than other regions: for example, about 1.9 thousand complexes were involved in the 2022 municipal elections. But a number of electoral innovations are planned for the autumn mayoral elections in Moscow this year, including a reduction in the number of regular polling stations and the installation of a new electronic voting terminal in each of them (see Kommersant on April 26). This just allowed the capital to abandon the installation of KOIBs at the sites and transfer them to the regions.

As Dmitry Reut, deputy chairman of the Moscow City Electoral Committee, explained to Kommersant, Moscow is handing over absolutely all of its complexes, and ordinary ballot boxes will be installed for those voters who want to vote at the polling station in the traditional way, and not through the new terminal. “Since we do not refuse the paper ballot, there will be ordinary ballot boxes at each polling station. Accordingly, each voter who came to the polling station has a choice of voting methods,” he stressed.

CEC member Anton Lopatin specified at the meeting that Moscow KOIBs would be transferred to 39 regions. The complexes will go to those subjects that have applied to the CEC with a request to increase their number, as well as to where KOIB-2010 is still working, “under the long term,” Mr. Lopatin said. According to the materials prepared for the CEC meeting, most of the complexes – 160 pieces – will go to the Krasnoyarsk Territory. Another 150 KOIBs will go to the Chelyabinsk region, 120 complexes will receive the Sverdlovsk and Yaroslavl regions, 110 – the Kaluga region and 100 – St. Petersburg. The remaining 33 regions will receive from 15 to 80 KOIBs each.

Ella Pamfilova admitted at the meeting that for her the current situation is an “open wound”. “Our great strategic desire to significantly increase the number of KOIBs was shattered by the impossibility of doing this last year on the part of the customer. But this does not mean that we will not work on it further,” she added. In addition, as Anton Lopatin noted, the CEC specialists managed to finalize the 2010 model KOIBs to the level of the 2017 models. The main change, according to him, is the ability to accept a ballot 80 cm long instead of the previous 60 cm.

Also at yesterday’s meeting, Mrs. Pamfilova said that a “big training event” was planned in Rostov-on-Don for the territorial election commissions of the new regions of the Russian Federation. “The whole end of May will be dedicated to this. Soon, in early June, the season of a single voting day in the regions will begin to open. The volume of tasks and work we have is incredibly large,” said the head of the CEC. Last week, she visited four new constituent entities to get acquainted with the preparation of their electoral system for the September elections, including the equipping of premises for polling stations.

Elena Rozhkova