Translated material
ARM wrestling
Elections in Russia will become even more virtual
An on-site extended meeting of the working group on improving the electoral legislation was held yesterday at the Central Election Commission.The head of the Central Election Commission, Vladimir Churov, not without pride, showed the guests of the meeting samples of new computer equipment, which, according to preliminary plans, should be equipped with a significant part of the country's polling stations in 2011. We are talking about electronic voting complexes - KOIBs, electronic voting complexes - KEGs, as well as a new development of the Federal Information Center under the Central Election Commission called AWP (automated workstation of a member of a precinct election commission). KOIBs scan the ballot as it is placed in the ballot box, KEGs make it possible to vote without paper using a touch screen, automated automated systems allow you to generate protocols in electronic form using an electronic digital signature and send them to territorial election commissions via public networks.
Plus, the CEC has developments for remote voting using the Internet, mobile phone and terminals for social cards. And where it is impossible to do without paper ballots, it is proposed to equip cars and helicopters delivering ballots with GLONASS satellite system beacons so that they do not get lost in hard-to-reach and remote places.
Vladimir Churov noted that the use of such systems “eliminates disputes about protocols, whether they are falsified or not, since the protocol is generated electronically and immediately enters public networks.” In addition, as expected, all this electoral high-tech will make it possible to reduce the cost of the expression of will, which is always useful in times of crisis. “If COIBs take quite a long time to break even, ten years or more, then devices for touch voting will pay for themselves within 4-6 years, that is, in one or two federal election cycles,” noted Mr. Churov. “And remote voting will immediately bring very large savings, cutting the costs of organizing elections abroad and in hard-to-reach and remote places by half.”
The CEC Chairman clarified that 90% of the proposed changes do not require amendments to the legislation. There are currently only restrictions on the installation of CEGs, which can be installed in no more than 1% of polling stations throughout the country, that is, 1000 precinct election commissions. But so far, according to Mr. Churov, it is technically possible to equip only five sections, so the amendments here are not so important. But it is necessary to legalize remote voting, but the deputies, as the head of the Central Election Commission put it, “keep thinking and thinking.”
“We are ready, in cooperation with the Central Election Commission, to think about the necessary changes to federal legislation,” noted Vladimir Pligin, head of the State Duma Committee on Legislation and State Construction, in response to this. “It’s unlikely that we can do them systematically in the near future, but if the need arises, we’ll look at the standards as quickly as possible.”
One of the controversial provisions may be the provisions of the law on personal data, which make it impossible to pre-publish voter lists, which is done all over the world. There is a partial way out of this situation: during the elections on October 11 last year, the Moscow City Election Commission made a program that allows anyone to check by their passport number whether they are included in the list. You can only obtain information about yourself personally. However, as Oleg Shein, deputy head of the Duma faction “A Just Russia”, noted, this does not solve the problem of “dead souls”: people who are included in lists where they should not be. “We need to change the law on personal data, not make it a sacred cow, let the lists be open, like abroad,” he suggested. However, Mr. Pligin immediately noted that this is completely impossible “in the conditions of the current legal culture and possible physical impact on these individuals.”
But the Presidential Envoy to the State Duma, Harry Minkh, is worried about something else: what will happen in the era of internetization of elections to people who “go to the polling station as if it were a holiday”? “We need to give them this opportunity,” he noted. However, there are no plans to liquidate polling stations in Russia in the foreseeable future, so those who like voting will not have to deny themselves this pleasure.
Closing the meeting, Vladimir Churov invited skeptical party representatives to try out the new products themselves. “We are ready to provide you with such equipment for voting at your conventions,” he suggested. “Your costs are only for transportation.” The party members thought about it.
The project for the technical modernization of the electoral system, meanwhile, is still under consideration by the government. The Central Election Commission proposed two options: the first - with the complete computerization of eight large cities - the capitals of federal districts, the second - with the modernization of polling stations in cities with a population of 100 thousand people, so that as a result more than half of Russian voters would vote electronically. The difference in material costs for implementing projects, according to Mr. Churov, is small. And in total, the re-equipment of the country’s electoral system itself will require, according to the head of the commission, “a few, but not tens of billions of rubles.”