The process of forming the Public Chamber for 2014-2017 has been completed: on Saturday night, the working group for organizing the elections of 43 members summed up the results of the first Internet voting in the history of the chamber. More than 2.3 million votes were cast for 259 candidates in 14 nominations, more than 350,000 voters took part in the elections, estimated Rostelecom representative Vladimir Antonenko.

Most of those elected are representatives of organizations loyal to the Kremlin: the head of the ISEPI foundation close to the Kremlin, Dmitry Badovsky, a former associate of the first deputy head of the presidential administration, Vyacheslav Volodin, Maria Komarova, the former press secretary of Nashi, Kristina Potupchik, and an activist of the Nashi project, Stopkham, Dmitry Chugunov, the author of the song, “Go Forward, Vladimir Putin!” Vladimir Slepak, the organizer of the picket at the US embassy in Moscow against sanctions, Artem Kiryanov, and the organizer of actions in defense of the Russian language in Ukraine, Denis Ryzhy.

Not a single candidate from the unofficial "Alexei Navalny list" - lawyer Elena Lukyanova, deputy director of the "Golos" movement Grigory Melkonyants, human rights activists Boris Altshuler and Elena Alshanskaya - made it into the chamber, despite being leaders at the beginning of the campaign. On the eve of the final, the head of the foundation - operator of the "Russian Public Initiative" (ROI) portal, where the voting took place, Ilya Massukh, accused several people on the list of trying to "rig the votes." This happened after another candidate, former United Russia member Valery Fedotov, accused ROI of "stealing" votes.

Nine candidates dropped out in 30 days of the campaign, two of them for abuse of administrative resources. Three of them - Council of Muftis expert Ruslan Kurbanov, head of the Congress of Peoples of the Caucasus Ali Totorkulov and political strategist Alexander Ryavkin - were removed from the elections on the last day. The working group explained that Rostelecom informed it of a "significant number" of votes cast for them from the same IP addresses. Two days earlier, when reviewing the candidates' complaints, Massukh said that it was impossible to determine the IP address from which voters voted.

The increased flow of requests from several IP addresses to the voting site was detected during the monitoring of Rostelecom organized in the last two days of voting, Antonenko told Vedomosti. Rostelecom did not check what these addresses were or where the computers were physically located, Antonenko said, and the company is not visible to whom these votes were for. Neither Rostelecom nor ROI sent any reports of abnormal activity to law enforcement agencies, Massukh and Antonenko told Vedomosti. A source at Rostelecom told Vedomosti that the company had launched an internal investigation.

ROI will propose improving the methods of monitoring online elections, Massukh said, in particular, there is an idea to limit the frequency of voting from one IP address. The possibility of assigning each voter a unique encryption code, with which he will be able to check whether his vote was counted, is also being discussed. And due to reports of cases of selling access codes to the state services portal, ROI will recommend that everyone update their passwords, Massukh concluded.

It is hardly possible to challenge the results of the electronic elections: the organizer does not have a legal entity and the courts will not accept claims for consideration, Melkonyants notes. The elections turned into a farce due to the authorities' fears that critically minded people would get into the chamber, but it was a useful experience, he believes: problems with organizing online voting were recorded. Investigation and punishment of the guilty will mitigate the damage to the image, believes Alexander Shepilov from the Federation Council's Commission on Information Society Development.

The Internet votes correctly