One ballot for online voting on amendments to the Constitution was declared invalid

One e-ballot used in online voting on constitutional amendments was declared invalid. This was announced by Artem Kostyrko, Head of the Department for Improving Territorial Administration and the Development of Smart Projects of the Moscow Government.

One voter, according to Kostyrko, during the voting stopped "the transaction between clicking the mouse and getting it into the crypto library of his computer." Kostyrko noted that "standard developer skills or more advanced user skills" will be enough for this.

The voter, according to Kostyrko, changed the answer, replacing the number that encoded one of the two options - for or against, with a third option, not provided by the system. The answer "Yes" was encrypted as the number 2212294583, the answer "No" - 450215437. The electronic voting system accepts any encrypted messages, because it cannot check what is encrypted before the end of the voting.

Meduza found out that the encrypted message of this voter, in principle, cannot be decrypted by the secret key of the election commission. This conclusion is confirmed by the data from the unregistered ballot. The voter could modify the message before sending, but he did not encode a different number, otherwise the system would decrypt it. How the user changed his voice is unknown. It's also not clear if he did it on purpose or if it happened as a result of a glitch.

Amendment. Initially, the note came out with the headline "One participant in the online vote on amendments to the Constitution ruined the electronic ballot." After analyzing the unaccounted bulletin, the heading was changed, and clarifications were made to the material.

• Electronic voting took place in Moscow and the Nizhny Novgorod region. In Moscow, 62.33% of voters were in favor of the amendments, while 37.67% were against. In the Nizhny Novgorod region, 59.69% of voters voted in favor, 40.31% voted against.