New regions are connected to the old ones – Newspaper Kommersant No. 64 (7509) dated 04/13/2023

An additional 210 million rubles will be spent on the digitalization of the electoral system in the new territories. This will allow deploying the state automated system (GAS) “Vybory” there by the single voting day, which will be held on September 10. As expected, on this day in four new constituent entities of the Russian Federation, elections to regional parliaments and representative authorities of administrative centers will be held for the first time.

At a meeting on April 12, the Central Election Commission introduced amendments to main action plan Federal Center for Informatization (FCI), supplementing it with points on the deployment of regional fragments of the GAS “Vybory” in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. It is planned to spend 210.9 million rubles on the relevant work, last week this money was additionally allocated by government decree, Alexander Sokolchuk, head of the FCI, said at a commission meeting. Getting additional funding was not easy, he admitted: “But we have their (money.— “b”) have been mined, and now we have the task of deploying everything in two months, by June 1, as much as possible to prepare the GAS “Vybory” in the new territories so that they are ready for a single voting day.

The Central Election Commission also received additional funds (almost 3.9 billion rubles) for the development and commissioning of a new digital platform, which should replace the GAS “Vybory”.

Thus, the total budget for the digitalization of the Russian electoral system for this year has grown from 1.5 billion to 5.6 billion rubles. “In my memory, the FCI has never received such a volume of funding for one year,” admitted Nikolai Bulaev, deputy chairman of the commission.

Therefore, the task is to effectively use this money, he stressed: the upgrade is done in such a way that the purchased equipment will be able to work with both the old and the new digital platform of the GAS “Vybory” (it is expected that it will be put into trial operation in 2024 ).

According to Mr. Bulaev, at the end of last year, the chairmen of the commissions of the new regions did a great job in order to use the funds allocated at the end of 2022 to purchase equipment that allows them to fully participate in the meetings of the Central Election Commission via video conferencing (VC). Also, without this, it would be impossible now to mount the segments of the GAS “Vybory”, the deputy chairman of the commission emphasized.

Indeed, the new electoral commissions got in touch with Moscow via videoconferencing last year. At the same time, Alexander Sokolchuk reported that the detailed design of information systems had been completed and the purchase of equipment had begun. Also last year, the Central Election Commission opened a register of voters living in the new territories, despite the fact that the commission allowed itself not to publish data on the number of voters in the territories where martial law was introduced.

Russia has a unified electoral system, and elections everywhere should be held regularly, explains United Russia State Duma deputy and former deputy chairman of the Central Election Commission Leonid Ivlev. He recalls that there was much less time to prepare for the first elections in Crimea after joining Russia, but they were already held using the GAS “Vybory”: with the support of regional authorities, territorial and subject commissions, in which it is necessary to have control and counting equipment, were equipped with everything necessary, and system administrators received the necessary permits. The deputy has no doubts that the necessary work will be carried out even now. Over the past few years, the digitalization of the electoral system has made great progress, and now the GAS “Vybory” is more than 20 subprograms that contain data on voters, parties, candidates, and election financing. All this is absolutely necessary for the operational management of the election campaign, concludes Mr. Ivlev.

Anastasia Kornya