Testing passed almost normally – Picture of the day – Kommersant

On September 2, members of the territorial election committee of electronic voting discussed the results of testing the system, which took place in all seven regions where online voting on the federal platform will be used. An emergency situation arose only in Kaluga: in the elections, its residents will vote only for two days, and not three, as in most regions, so the DEG training there should have begun a day later. However, two voters were able to vote before the official test, which formally led to the annulment of its results. The developers of the system promise that such incidents will not be repeated during the real voting.

The Coordinating Council for Public Control over Voting at the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation on Friday summed up the results of a two-day testing of the remote electronic voting system (DEV), organized on the federal platform, with the help of which seven regions will vote this year. Recall that this year residents of the Kaliningrad, Kaluga, Kursk, Novgorod, Pskov, Tomsk and Yaroslavl regions, as well as Moscow, will be able to vote electronically in the elections. However, a special system has been developed for the latter, which is tested separately. This year, for the first time, the DEG will work in different time zones, as well as in elections with different numbers of voting days. In most regions, voting will take three days, and in the Kaluga and Tomsk regions – two. For the first, testing was to take place from August 31 to September 1, for the latter – only on September 1.

All voters who submitted an application for participation in the current elections before August 28 could take part in the DEG training. According to the CEC, there are about 67,500 such people. Of these, about 20% took part in the training. The test participants were offered ballots as close to reality as possible, but with impersonal candidates and parties.

According to Yury Satirov, head of the development of the federal DEG platform at Rostelecom, turnout in some regions exceeded 20%, which is a good result for September 1, when the population is worried about the start of the school year. Most of the voters (more than 48%) turned out to be in Kaluga, where by-elections to the city council will be held in September. However, there was only one incident here. Kaluga testing was supposed to start on September 1 at 8:00. However, information appeared in the Telegram channels that even before the official start of testing, data on two voters were displayed on the DEG monitoring portal. This situation arose due to the transfer of data from the working base of the GAS “Vybory” to the test one, says Yury Satirov. According to him, during the automatic data upload, the start of voting was indicated not on September 1, but on August 30 (as in the regions that chose the three-day election format), which is why two voters were able to vote before the start of testing. At the same time, in Tomsk, where the training also started a day later, everything went smoothly. In the real elections, the repetition of such a situation is excluded, because there will be used data from the main database of the State Autonomous System “Elections”, which have been repeatedly checked, Mr. Satirov assures.

Oleg Artamonov, deputy chairman of the Territorial Election Commission (TEC), DEG, explained that from the point of view of Russian legislation, all test results in Kaluga had to be declared invalid. “A refinement is required here, because at the moment the legislation built for ordinary elections does not allow for the direct possibility of invalidating a ballot that is not spoiled, but was found to be thrown in a common ballot box before the start of voting,” he explained. But thanks to this situation, it was possible to test the option of filling out a protocol on recognizing the results of electronic voting as invalid, Mr. Artamonov summed up.

Oleg Zakharov, a member of the TEC DEG from the New People party, drew attention to another problem. On Friday Pskov City Court He has made a decision remove the list of “New People” from the elections to the City Duma. The party disputes this decision and, according to Mr. Zakharov, it may happen that it will have to be restored to the ballots right during the multi-day voting, but the federal DEG system does not provide for such an operation. In a conversation with Kommersant, Mr. Zakharov gave the example of the Pskov region, where in 2020 the court reinstated the candidate on Saturday (on the second day of voting), so new ballots had to be printed on Sunday night. The party member believes that such precedents may also arise in numerous local elections in single-mandate constituencies. The developers of the system promised to think about this issue.

Elena Rozhkova