The Public Chamber has developed a single standard for monitoring DEG and wants to send it to the regions

The Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation has developed a unified standard for monitoring remote electronic voting (DEG) and plans to send it to the regions where this form of expression of will will be used this year. Then, the process of training of DEG observers will begin on the ground: this will be done by the Independent Public Monitoring Association, which already trains public observers at traditional sites. According to the expert, it is difficult to teach an ordinary person to professionally observe the DEG, but there is no shortage of people for this: rather, there are not enough special software solutions for analyzing the data array.

The Public Chamber (PC) of the Russian Federation has developed a unified standard for monitoring DEG, similar to the “gold standard” for monitoring traditional sites. This was announced at an expert event in the OP on June 27 by the first deputy chairman of the commission of the chamber on public control and work with citizens’ appeals Maxim Grigoriev.

Recall that the “gold standard” of the EP for monitoring ordinary voting has existed for several years and is a questionnaire with criteria for evaluating the voting process. The observer answers “yes” or “no” to the proposed questions and, if he finds violations, reports this to the OP. The “gold standard” is updated annually as innovations in the electoral process appear. According to Mr. Grigoriev, the document is used by more than 2,000 public organizations throughout the country.

Maxim Grigoriev explained to Kommersant that the standard for monitoring the DEG contains 47 questions and has already been sent to some regions where online voting will be used in the autumn elections (25 regions, including Moscow, will use the DEG this year). “We still have time until September, there is no need to send the standard massively to all regions. It must be understood that if thousands of people use the “gold standard” for monitoring at polling stations, who need to be trained in time, then significantly fewer DEG observers are needed,” Mr. Grigoriev noted. He added that the Association “Independent Public Monitoring” under the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation will be engaged in the training of DEG observers.

At the OP event on June 27, Maxim Grigoriev also presented a report on DEG monitoring tools, which suggests some improvements to the process for the upcoming Single Voting Day. So, according to public activists, it is necessary to organize the admission of observers to the division of the encryption key (as a rule, the key is divided into several parts before the start of voting, which are stored by different people). The authors of the report also propose to place the separated elements of the encryption key in protective safe packages in the premises of the territorial election commission for online voting (TIK DEG) and leave them under constant video surveillance with broadcast in the public domain.

In addition, the public advocates continuous video surveillance in the premises of the TEC DEG with an open broadcast of the image during the entire voting period and display on an open portal for monitoring all stages of the DEG. In their opinion, it is necessary to deploy jobs for online observers at the sites of regional OPs, as well as create conditions for their free access to the transaction archive to ensure selective verification. Finally, the authors of the report propose to create conditions for the voter to freely check the registration of his vote on a specialized monitoring portal and place links to electronic signature verification services on it, allowing you to verify the authenticity of the signatures of TEC DEG members.

Oleg Zakharov, a member of the TEC DEG under the CEC of Russia in 2022, the former chairman of the Yaroslavl Regional Electoral Committee, believes that there are two specific points in monitoring the DEG, without which any training manuals will not work effectively: “Firstly, this is basic knowledge in the field of work blockchain, transfer, storage and verification of data transmitted in this way. To check paper ballots, you only need attention and a calculator; electronic ballots require a special program.” The second nuance, according to the expert, is the analysis of big data in dynamics: in monitoring the DEG, it is required, for example, to compare transaction chains every 10 minutes or 10 seconds and compare them with a common base in order to identify peak loads of the same type of actions that can be stuffed . “It is hardly possible to transfer the observation of the DEG to the level of an ordinary person, but using such observers as volunteers to collect a large array of casual data for their verification is quite promising,” explains Mr. Zakharov. At the same time, in his opinion, there is no shortage of people to monitor the DEG, but there is a shortage of software solutions that could double-check the observation reports – such as, for example, when an observer at the polling station counts all voters “by their heads” and then can compare whether cardinal “increase” of ballots in the ballot box. “Here, in fact, there are no such software tools, they have to be made by ourselves, from scratch, it is difficult and expensive,” sums up Oleg Zakharov.

Elena Rozhkova