The Public Chamber will create an expert group to improve the electronic voting system

An expert group of party representatives and IT specialists will be created at the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation to work on improving the federal system of remote electronic voting (DEG), Oleg Artamonov, head of the DEG election commission, said at a round table on Tuesday. Participants at the event, which included subject matter experts and online voting observers, shared their opinions on how to improve monitoring and the operation of the system as a whole. For example, there were proposals to expand the corps of observers, simplify their registration and create a mechanism through which voters could directly send appeals and complaints about the DEG system to the election commission.

On September 26, a round table was held at the Public Chamber (PC) of the Russian Federation, at which IT experts summed up the results of monitoring the DEG on the federal platform in the September elections. Let us recall that DEG was used in 25 regions, including Moscow: the capital has its own platform based on the Mos.ru portal, and other regions vote through the public services portal using the federal system. The organization of the federal DEG is carried out by a special territorial election commission (TEC DEG), and in Moscow these functions are assigned to the Moscow City Election Commission.

In general, the system worked stably on election days, reported Aleksey Shcherbakov, a member of the technical group at the OP: “There were short-term peaks of only a few seconds – these are acceptable deviations recorded at a time when there was a large flow of votes from voters.” Also this year, for the first time, an unusual situation occurred, due to which electronic voting in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug was suspended for some time: due to a system error, some voters received an incomplete set of ballots. According to Mr. Shcherbakov, after the error was corrected, voting continued, all voters received a full package of documents and had the opportunity to vote again. This did not affect the final election results, he assured.

Chairman of TEC DEG Oleg Artamonov recalled that in the 2023 elections the number of voters on the federal platform exceeded 1 million. This year, for the first time, a single standard for monitoring DEGs developed by the OP was used, and the number of online observers, according to Mr. Artamonov, approximately doubled : from 100 people in 2022 to 200 in 2023. Among them were representatives of parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties, as well as a special group of experts in the RF OP, where access to the blockchain observation node was organized.

In addition, this year, representatives of the academic community joined the group of experts for the first time: the head of the department of computer security and mathematical methods of information processing at Yaroslavl State University, Dmitry Murin, and the head of the department of mathematical cybernetics and information technology at MTUSI, Mikhail Gorodnichev. According to the latter, the DEG process is not understood by everyone today, which is why trust in it decreases. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out measures to increase confidence in the new form of voting and “literally explain to people why it is impossible to interfere in the course of the DEG,” the expert is convinced. And Mr. Murin, based on the results of his participation in the observation, proposed expanding the “front of observers”, since these are the people who can provide voters with an understanding of the operation of the DEG system. To do this, in his opinion, it is possible, for example, to simplify the procedure for registering observers for DEGs and make this option available to everyone through the government services portal.

DEG expert and observer from the Yabloko party Dmitry Nesterov, in turn, proposed to think about unifying the registration of observers working in the TEC DEG or remotely on a special portal (this year it was possible to observe the federal DEG in three ways: remotely on a special website , in the premises of the RF OP and in the TEC DEG). Now these are different procedures, Yabloko explained: remote observers are registered by the Rostelecom system, and those working in the TEC DEG are registered by the commission itself. As a result, a conflict arises, due to which the expert could not be personally present at the TEC DEG and observed online. Such situations, according to Mr. Nesterov, can be avoided by clearly describing the procedure for appointing observers in regulations. The party member also proposed to attach the official form of the final protocol with the voting results, certified by the members of the commission, to the portal for monitoring the DEG, so that any observer could receive it. In addition, in both DEG systems there is no mechanism for working with appeals and complaints that would allow them to immediately get to the election commission, noted Dmitry Nesterov. At the same time, he believes, it is necessary to develop clear standards for processing such requests.

Following the round table, Oleg Artamonov suggested that the experts continue their work on improving the DEG. For this, according to him, an expert group will be created in the RF OP to study incoming proposals, which will include representatives of parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties, as well as IT specialists.

Elena Rozhkova