Review of registered voters – Newspaper Kommersant No. 160 (7361) of 09/01/2022

At the next meeting, the Central Election Commission (CEC) discussed Moscow’s readiness for municipal elections, where, along with electronic voting, an electronic voter register will be used for the first time. The chairman of the Moscow City Electoral Committee (MGIK), Olga Kirillova, said that the test of the system, which took place on August 26, proved its operability, and Artem Kostyrko, a representative of the mayor’s office, specified that all the problems found had already been eliminated. The CEC meeting was attended by representatives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, who traditionally oppose electronic voting. However, despite the criticism from the Communists, the current municipal campaign is calmer than the last one, and the number of applications to the Moscow State Institute of Cinematography does not reach even a hundredth of a percent of all Moscow voters, Olga Kirillova said.

At its meeting on August 31, the CEC continued a series of meetings with representatives of regional commissions, who report on the preparations for the single voting day. At yesterday’s meeting, the turn came to Moscow, where councils of municipal deputies in 125 districts will be elected on September 9-11. The capital will once again use remote electronic voting (DEV), with an electronic voter register being used for the first time. Legislation now allows such a register to be maintained, but so far only the capital has been able to technically implement it. According to the creators, the registry should minimize provocations and human errors during the elections and make the procedure as convenient as possible: now there is no need to apply in advance for online voting at the place of residence, the decision can be made up to the last minutes of voting on September 11, and the registry will record the issuance of a ballot for site or online and, accordingly, will block the second method of voting.

Accordingly, the test of the system on August 26 was conducted both online and at traditional sites, open one per district. About 460,000 people took part in the trial voting, with more than 446,000 choosing online; about 11.5 thousand more came to the polling stations. Voters answered the question about the improvement of the districts, and after counting the electronic votes, it became clear that the winning option was in the lead by 39 thousand votes – thus, counting all the votes from the polling stations could no longer change it, even if all offline voters chose Alternative option. According to Olga Kirillova, chairman of the IPCC, both systems demonstrated their efficiency during the training.

Artem Kostyrko, Head of the Department for Improving Territorial Administration and the Development of Smart Projects of the Moscow Government, spoke in more detail about the training session. According to him, the operability of the entire technical complex was checked, including in the conditions of a power outage and the Internet, and in some cases problems arose – for example, printers did not work immediately. On August 31, the first day of work of precinct election commissions (PECs), all problems were corrected, Mr. Kostyrko said. According to him, among other things, a new form of electronic ballot was tested, which should contain about 20 candidates (in total, 1,417 mandates are filled in Moscow, competition in each district is about four people per seat). Mr. Kostyrko said that the system was finalized for convenient scrolling through the ballot from any gadget, be it an old or small smartphone or tablet.

The Moscow organizers of the DEG are counting on the fact that delays in summing up its results, as was the case during last year’s Duma elections, will be avoided this time and the preliminary results of online voting will be summed up first. This will happen after the assembly of the decryption key, and it, in turn, will follow 15 minutes after the polling stations are closed: the electronic system will receive the votes of Muscovites who opened the electronic ballot at the very last moment for another quarter of an hour. After that, the results of the DEG will be sent to the screens of the territorial election commission of the DEG, to ordinary TECs and to the Public Election Observation Headquarters and will be updated as protocols are received from ordinary polling stations. Protocols can be received by TECs all night, and only after they have been fully processed will official results be summed up.

Representatives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation attended the CEC meeting: State Duma deputy Denis Parfyonov and secretary of the Moscow City Committee Nikolai Volkov. The Communist Party consistently opposes electronic voting and seeks its abolition. Mr. Parfyonov again noted that “you can talk as much as you like about the advantages of the system,” but no one has yet told how to prevent electronic stuffing, and it is still not clear how the incoming data is analyzed. “Contemplation” of the site for monitoring DEG statistics (a special observer on the mos.ru portal will provide everyone with updated data on the number of participants in online voting during the DEG.— “b”) does not particularly affect anything without access to the mechanisms of the system, Mr. Parfyonov lamented.

Olga Kirillova reminded him that Alexei Venediktov, the former head of the Moscow election observation headquarters (now included in the register of foreign media agents), persistently urged those who doubted the transparency of the DEG to recount the votes, and after the Duma elections, an expert technical group was created to recheck the results of the DEG, but in the end she was unable to confirm the versions put forward about possible violations. “If we want to prove something, then we must roll up our sleeves and sit and count. Today, we consider DEG to be a tool that has shown its viability,” said Ms. Kirillova. The IPCC emphasizes that the innovation in the form of an electronic voter register will not affect the tabulation process in any way, the procedure remains unchanged.

Mr. Volkov, in turn, was indignant at the role of the executive branch in the process of electronic voting: “Practically on a par with the chairman of the election commission, a high-ranking employee of the mayor’s office is responsible for conducting elections.” The communist asked the representatives of the Moscow City Electoral Committee whether Artem Kostyrko was really the developer of the DEG system and the electronic registry, but the question was intercepted by the chairman of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova: “Of course, our commissions cannot do the technical part, and it’s exactly the same with us: customers are Rostelecom, Mintsifry and so on. Here it is necessary to correctly place the accents. What confuses you? You can’t blame them for doing the elections — that’s their duty.” Olga Kirillova explained that the competition for the development of the registry was won by a specialized technical company, but the solution is being implemented on the mos.ru platform, which is represented by Artem Kostyrko. Then the secretary of the city committee asked Olga Kirillova to give the party representative access to the “internal tools” of the Moscow DEG system in order to “work together, restore confidence in the electoral system, or give correct comments based on facts.” Ms. Kirillova, in response, recalled that the Moscow City Electoral Committee includes representatives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, both with the right of decisive and with the right of an advisory vote, who are not limited in anything. It should be noted that Kommersant’s interlocutors who were previously familiar with the situation have repeatedly noted that parties that call on their voters to refuse to vote online lose some potential voters and are generally inferior online to United Russia, whose supporters are “more loyal to government initiatives” and no objection to DEG.

However, despite the questions and claims of representatives of the Communist Party, says Olga Kirillova, the current campaign in the capital is much calmer than the last. According to her, this year only 632 appeals were received by the Moscow State Institute of Cinematography, which, in percentage terms, does not reach even a hundredth of a percent of all Moscow voters.

Afanasy Sborov, Elena Rozhkova