The Central Election Commission asked presidential candidates to more actively appoint observers to monitor electronic voting

The Central Election Commission (CEC) gathered on Tuesday representatives of all parliamentary parties, online voting system developers and IT experts to discuss the use of remote electronic voting (REV) in the presidential elections. Participants in the event, in particular, learned that the most online active voters in the country (not counting Moscow) are in Chuvashia, and the electronic ballot can also be spoiled. And election organizers called on candidates and the parties that nominated them to more actively appoint observers for the DEGs, of which there were depressingly few during previous campaigns.

The maximum number of observers for online voting in the presidential elections on March 15–17 can reach 2 thousand people, said the chief architect of the DEG, Yuri Satirov, at a round table at the Central Election Commission. This is twice as much as the candidate and the party that nominated him can put up in regular polling stations, he calculated. Of course, we are not talking about those who are physically present in the premises of the TEC DEG (only one person from each candidate can be there at a time), but about the opportunity to monitor the progress of the elections through the observation portal. Representatives of public chambers, as well as observers appointed by candidates, the parties that nominated them, their proxies and even regional party cells in those 28 constituent entities of the Russian Federation where the DEG will be held, Mr. Satirov listed, will have access to it. The appointment of observers will begin on March 4, he recalled, and campaigners would do well to plan the balance of power in advance: after all, 2.7 million applications for remote voting have already been submitted, and these are votes from voters whose fate should not be indifferent to the candidates. “Observers will not appoint themselves,” warned the chief architect of the DEG and recalled that at the 2023 regional elections there were only 144 online observers.

All party members spoke out for progress, but defended their understanding of the process. Deputy Secretary of the General Council of United Russia Sergei Perminov recalled that his party has been actively using digital services for a long time. “DEG is reliable, safe, modern, this is the future,” he said. “There are many critics, but I am a practitioner and understand how it works. And I understand that there are no flaws in this, there are no secret meanings. Blockchain is not an abstraction, it is a working technology!”

Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Sergei Obukhov, on the contrary, insisted that the use of DEG “replaced objective and understandable monitoring of real voters and paper ballots.” Replacing paper ballots with electronic ones requires citizens participating in the election process to have special knowledge that members of election commissions and observers do not possess, and as a result, elections become like an electronic online casino, the communist worried. For example, after the all-Russian training of the DEG, the final documents, as reported by the Central Election Commission, turned out to contain electronic ballots of an unknown form, but no one explained what they were, Mr. Obukhov was perplexed. And where are the guarantees that similar ones will not be revealed following the results of the presidential elections, he complained.

Electronic ballots of an unspecified form are the same as spoiled paper ballots, Oleg Artamonov, chairman of the TEC DEG, immediately explained. If you have certain skills, a voter can not only put a tick on the ballot for a candidate, but also add something of his own there. Both ballots were deliberately distorted during the training – and it is very good that the system did not discard them, but took them into account, the expert emphasized. True, it is still unclear whether such ballots should be considered invalid or, after all, ballots of an unknown type, he admitted.

The deputy head of the LDPR faction in the State Duma, Stanislav Naumov, proposed moving away from the secrecy of voting altogether: democracy does not stand still, it is necessary to give a person the opportunity to check that he voted and his vote was counted, the deputy insisted. His colleague from A Just Russia – For Truth, Yuri Grigoriev, admitted that his party perceives the transition to the DEG as an “objective and inevitable process,” but it would be good to slow it down until openness and security are worked out at the all-Russian level. But “New People,” represented by State Duma deputy Anton Tkachev, advocated a “progressive approach”: the DEG makes elections more accessible to young voters, reduces the budgetary burden on the electoral system and saves time, the party member explained his position.

According to the Ministry of Digital Development, the most popular DEG turned out to be in Chuvashia, where more than 187 thousand people, that is, 20.6% of the total number of voters, submitted applications to participate in online voting in the presidential elections. In second place is the Kamchatka Territory (12.9%), in third are the Altai Territory and the Pskov Region (10.6% each). Moscow is not taken into account in these statistics, since pre-registration for participation in the DEG is not required there.

Anastasia Kornya