The Public Chamber will create a technical group to monitor the DEG

In the next two weeks, a working group of technical IT specialists will be formed “within the framework of the coordination council at the Public Chamber” (OP) to improve the mechanisms for monitoring remote electronic voting (DEG) on the federal platform, which were tested on a single voting day in 2023. The chairman of the territorial election commission for the DEG (TEC DEG) Oleg Artamonov told Vedomosti.

In addition to IT specialists, the group, he said, will include experts who were observers at the last elections. In particular, these are representatives of parliamentary (A Just Russia) and non-parliamentary (Yabloko) parties, as well as independent observers and representatives of the OP. “This [будет] it’s an expert group, not a political one, it’s for people who work with DEG from a technical point of view,” explained Artamonov. The final composition of the expert group will consist of 8–10 people. Work has already been planned for the next two months, and by the end of the year it is planned to develop collective decisions on key issues, added the chairman of the TEC DEG.

Among the specific mechanisms for improvement, he named, in particular, the need to divide the status of observers into those who work remotely with the portal and those who are personally present at the TEC DEG. Mixing them now “leads to confusion and potential problems in work,” Artamonov explained. There is no exact idea yet about who will be offered the developed proposals – the OP or the Central Election Commission.

Electoral expert, DEG researcher Dmitry Nesterov proposed, for example, clarifying the procedure for receiving copies of final protocols, opening registration for everyone who wants to become observers through “State Services” and improving the procedure for handling complaints. Observer from “A Just Russia – For Truth” Pyotr Losev advised developing a mechanism for publishing the turnout for the DEGs for individual PECs.

Maxim Grigoriev, co-chairman of the coordination council under the OP for public control over voting, recalled that this year the digital safe package became an important tool that made it possible to establish the immutability of electronic votes. They also plan to develop this tool in the future. Head of the Department of Mathematical Cybernetics and Information Technologies of MTUCI Mikhail Gorodnichev proposed to further popularize DEG, explaining the procedure “on the fingers.” A member of the technical group in the OP, Alexey Shcherbakov, in turn, recalled the unusual situation that occurred during electronic voting in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug. There, due to a system error, some voters received an incomplete set of ballots, as a result of which voting was suspended for two hours.

Now the DEG is carried out on two different platforms: one platform is used in the capital, and another is used at the federal level. As Vedomosti’s interlocutor close to monitoring the system says, the practice developed in such a way that the Moscow system was more open to observers for the first three years.

“There are more different administrative actors in and around the federal DEG system,” he says. “Now some people within this system have tried to somehow activate and legitimize the new expert group.” Lately, the interlocutor continues, surveillance in the capital has been carried out through the OP.

Everything related to the DEG is of great political importance for the current leadership, so the result of the efforts of various working groups largely depends not on the quality of their proposals and the will of the developers, but on political will, Nesterov told Vedomosti.

“The presence of an informal dialogue between experts, developers, and election commissions is institutionally better than its complete absence,” Nesterov believes. According to him, independent observers managed to influence the Moscow DEG system to a certain extent. “In such communication formats, the presence of experts with diverse competencies, from IT to legal, is useful and important. A practical understanding of the institution of elections and the realities of the current system of election commissions is extremely useful,” Nesterov said.

The main questions in the formation of such a group are what exactly the composition of experts will be and what information they will have access to, says electoral expert Stanislav Andreychuk. “The problem with DEG is that no one has seen the system code except the creators, because of this it is impossible to say how reliable the data is seen by observers,” he explained to Vedomosti.

The head of the public headquarters for monitoring elections in Moscow, Vadim Kovalev, explained that the capital has a general observation mechanism (observer-test.mos.ru), accessible to everyone, this is a “mirror of the entire system.” A more advanced level is available for representatives of political parties with access to an observer node (i.e., a computer connected to the blockchain network from which you can monitor what is happening on the electronic site). There is also verification transaction technology.

DEG in presidential elections will be used only in those regions where it was previously tested (there are now 27 such regions), recalled Ilya Grashchenkov, president of the Center for Regional Policy Development. “It’s one thing when DEG is a handy algorithm [и в регионах голосуют порядка 10% населения]but it’s another thing when he’s dominant,” the expert said.

For the first time, the DEG system was used in the 2019 elections of deputies in Moscow. Since 2020, it has been used at the federal level and is being implemented by Rostelecom at the request of the Central Election Commission. In March 2022, an article regulating the DEG appeared in the federal law “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights.” In 2022, with its help, elections were held in seven regions.

In the 2023 elections, DEG was used in 25 regions. In total, 30 regions applied to participate in the DEG – 24 of them were approved (a special TEC was created for them). In the fall of 2022, the chairman of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, declared the unacceptability of the forced introduction of DEG in all regions of Russia.

Pamfilova noted that voters should retain the right to choose. It allowed for the spread of DEG throughout the country, but the security of the system and the level of trust of citizens are important.