The CEC didn’t double anywhere – Newspaper Kommersant No. 212 (7413) dated 11/16/2022

The Central Election Commission (CEC) reported on Tuesday a complete victory over lovers of double voting: according to the results of a check conducted by a special working group of the CEC, no such cases were recorded at the elections held in September, apart from one attempt thwarted by the local election commission. However, this is rather a temporary lull, the expert warns, the elections that took place in the fall were not the loudest, and those who liked to test the electoral system for strength were not up to it. However, by the next federal campaign, attempts at double voting may resume.

The Central Election Commission did not reveal cases of double voting in the elections in September, Anton Lopatin, a member of the commission, said at a commission meeting on November 15. According to him, the specialized working group came to this conclusion after checking all citizens who first applied for voting at their location using the Mobile Voter service, and then changed their minds and came to the polling stations at the place of registration. In total there were 585 such people in 37 regions.

However, according to Mr. Lopatin, monitoring of the media and social networks still revealed two cases when voters tried to deceive the system. The first was discovered by the Primorsky Territory Electoral Commission even before the start of the work of the CEC group: a resident of Vladivostok voted twice during early voting. On this fact, the regional election commission conducted an inspection, the materials were transferred to law enforcement agencies, the case is under control. In the second case, a member of the territorial election commission of the Nagorny district of Moscow, Dmitry Kuznetsov, came to the metropolitan polling station with a new passport and voted on it, and then found that he could do it again through the city services portal using the old passport data for which his account was registered. However, the voter himself did not take advantage of this opportunity.

The latest case confirmed that the actualization of data on voters in the GAS “Vybory” system is not yet as fast as we would like, Mr. Lopatin admitted, adding that the new digital platform will shorten its time. The fact that the working group for the first time in recent times did not reveal cases of repeated receipt of ballots during the elections confirms the effectiveness of the CEC decisions aimed at preventing such violations, Anton Lopatin is sure. We are talking about the ability of a voter to cancel a previously submitted application for voting at the place of residence (a total of 1,635 such applications were withdrawn) and the loss of the opportunity to vote at the polling station for those citizens who were included in the list of remote electronic voting, the member of the commission explained.

CEC Chairman Ella Pamfilova praised her colleague and the entire commission for their principled attitude to the problem, regarding which “there were many speculations, but there were also facts.” Now the Central Election Commission is even ready to invite colleagues from the United States for an internship, Ms. Pamfilova said. “We can teach them a lot,” she said.

A special working group to control the one-time receipt of a ballot was created at the CEC in 2019 after numerous complaints about the Mobile Voter system (it allows voting at the place of residence, not registration). Its implementation has led to numerous attempts to publicly demonstrate that the electoral system is not hackable. As a result, the legislator even had to introduce criminal liability for repeated voting, although this could not stop everyone. The record holder was Yael Ilinski, a Russian woman living in Israel, who in 2020 managed to vote on amendments to the Constitution three times: online, at the Russian Embassy in Tel Aviv and at the consulate in Haifa.

It should be noted that attempts to control remote voting were made even before the Mobile Voter: for example, back in 2012, the then chairman of the CEC, Vladimir Churov, instructed to check each absentee ballot (then it was necessary for the expression of will not at the place of registration), according to which voting was held in during the Duma and presidential elections. However, the results of the audit were never made public.

No facts of double voting have been revealed, but the problem has been put on hold rather than resolved, political strategist Roman Smirnov believes. He recalls that regional elections (namely, they were held this year) attract less attention than federal ones. In addition, due to the general situation, people who are traditionally involved in testing the electoral system for strength were not up to it, and tougher penalties for such actions should also have had an effect, the expert suggests. But this does not mean at all that the opposition will not return to such methods of political struggle by the next elections, Mr. Smirnov warns.

Anastasia Kornya