SEAL FROM THE CITY

TOWARDS ELECTIONS

The Citadel of Elections is considered to be the Central Election Commission. Then the precinct election commissions are bastions. All the most important electoral events take place here. Ballots are brought to the PEC. It is here that they are stored in iron safes for ...

The Citadel of Elections is considered to be the Central Election Commission. Then the precinct election commissions are bastions. All the most important electoral events take place here. Ballots are brought to the PEC. It is here that they are stored in iron safes behind sealed doors, sometimes even, for reliability, they spend the night in the company of a policeman. And here is the counting of votes. The Novaya correspondent was convinced of the weakness and unreliability of the electoral bastions.

The incident happened in one of the precinct commissions (No. 67, Central electoral district) on Upper Krasnoselskaya Street. The Electoral Committee was formed by the All-Union Institute of Fiber Optic Communications and Information Processing. The commission as a commission: photographs of candidates on the wall, a safe in the corner, posters in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Victory over the table. The safe contains the stamp, absentee certificates, and since Tuesday, and most importantly: ballot papers. Members of the electoral committee (12 people) are guarding all this, they are on duty in turn. The keys to the premises and the electoral commission bins are received at their institute, after the office is closed, they are returned to the guards of this institute.

To be sure, we decided to insure. They found a pencil case for the keys at the institute. Aluminium, cylindrical. From below - the bottom, from above - it is screwed with a lid, which is then sealed before handing over the keys. So that no one gets to them unnoticed.

... Everything happened by a fatal accident. The pencil case with the keys rolled off the table and fell - the bottom ... fell off, the keys fell out. Here it turned out that the bottom flies out from shaking by hand. The keys can be removed if desired, while the seal remains intact. And this means that if there is malicious intent, an attacker who knows the secret has access to the safe, that is, to ballots and print. The bastion has fallen.

“I participated in the elections seven times, and the TEC was never instructed about keeping the keys!” Anatoly Rogov, a member of the electoral committee who was on duty on Tuesday, says to this with annoyance. He tries to reinforce the bottom, knocks the pencil case on the safe to hammer it in tightly, but with the next shaking, the aluminum circle makes a feint in flight over the table.

In some electoral commissions, the keys are stored in a bag, an envelope, or even given against a signature to the chairman and lie in his pocket. The price of the issue at the site with the ill-fated pencil case is the votes of two and a half thousand voters.