Voting at the place of residence was popular with voters, the Central Election Commission believes / Maria Tsvetkova / REUTERS

On average, 30-35% of voters came to the regional elections on September 10, while of those who voted absentee under the new rules and were included in the lists based on their place of residence, according to preliminary data, about 70% voted, Deputy Chairman of the Central Election Commission Nikolai Bulaev reported on Friday. The exact figures will be published later, he promised. In the 2016 State Duma elections, about 65% of voters who received absentee ballots made it to the polling stations.

Voting at the place of residence was first tested on September 10 in 20 regions. No later than five days before the vote, the voter could submit a corresponding application through the state services portal, to the MFC or territorial election commission and vote at the chosen polling station, and after this period, he received an application with a special tear-off stamp and could vote at one of the special polling stations.

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How did the single voting day go?

Politics / Photo

The new procedure does not allow tracking the migration of voters: the GAS Vybory portal only posts information about absentee voters and citizens included in new lists, and this is not enough, notes Grigory Melkonyants, co-chairman of Golos. According to him, compared to absentee ballots, which were recorded in the protocol, it has become even worse: the number of voters at their place of residence is not recorded there, and if the calculation is carried out, it is not transparent: a week has already passed since the elections, and no one has seen this data. In addition, the Central Election Commission's figures for the number of applications (see inset) differ from the calculations of Golos itself: according to the website izbirkom.ru, 183,464 people submitted applications no later than five days before the elections, and another 19,427 submitted stamped applications, while the number of voters excluded from the lists exceeded the number of those included in the lists by 4,492 people.

How many were there?

As of September 10, 223,407 voters have submitted applications to vote at their place of residence. 21,928 of them made their decision in the last four days and received applications with special stamps.

There were some glitches in this system, but they did not seem to be widespread, according to Golos. For example, a resident of Ryazan, as the coordinator of the local branch, Sofia Ivanova, said, as an experiment, filed an application for de-registration at two MFCs at once and received two coupons for inclusion in the lists at polling stations No. 1011 and 1012. On September 10, she voted at polling station No. 1011, after which they were ready to give her a ballot at the second polling station, but she refused, saying that she did not want to break the law. Of the dozen Golos activists who tried to test the effectiveness of the new system, only one managed to do something similar, Ivanova admits. For example, she first filed an application at the TEC, and then received a de-registration with a stamp, but at the polling station where she was assigned, the commission members said that she did not have the right to vote there and, since she had received a stamp, she could only do so at a special polling station.

In 20 regions, only 22 cases were recorded when a citizen was included in the lists at two polling stations at once, says Bulaev. This was a program failure, it has already been corrected and there will be no new failures, he is sure. The deputy chairman of the Central Election Commission did not comment on the Golos calculations, considering them incorrect. The Central Election Commission also recorded a difference between those included in the lists and excluded from them (as of September 10 - about 4,000 people), but this is due to the peculiarities of the program: it was formulated so strictly that it did not allow a single error, explains Bulaev. And if at least one different symbol appeared when entering an address, the voter could no longer be identified. But this will be fixed and the program will become more flexible, he summarizes.

Voting at the place of residence turned out to be more popular than absentee voting