Majoritarian election system

The programmer Ilya Sukhorukov watched electronic voting. He told Yulia Latynina about the fakes of blockchain, watchmen, Mayors and Certificates of the FSB

According to the results of a “paper” vote, candidates from a “smart vote” defeated EP in Moscow with a crushing score. According to the results of electronic voting, they all suddenly lost. At the same time, the results of the EG were declared not an hour later, as before, but much later.

The most interesting thing took place in the district commissions in electronic polling stations. There were also observers, but for the most part technically unknown to such work. True, there were exceptions. And so “very smart” they banned access to the observer’s node (that is, a computer connected to a blockchain network from which you can control what is happening on an electronic area). And when they allowed, it turned out that it does not work, because she no longer has a security certificate issued by the FSB of the Russian Federation. Its action expired at 20:00 on September 19, that is, immediately after the end of the elections. Julia Latynina talked about what was happening in the electronic weekend that night with Ilya Sukhorukova, a professional programmer, who was an observer from Anastasia Bryukhanova on Electronic Wick that night and who was the first to raise an alarm and tried to break through to Node.

- Are the results of electronic voting forged?

- We do not know yet. We have some guesses that we are now dealing with.

- OK. Then let's go in order. What is this story with FSB certificates? Preferably on the fingers.

- On the fingers. All actions between computers are made using requests. Each such request is signed by a certificate. Well, as in the building at the entrance there is a man, and you show him a passport. In the same way, each request from a computer to a computer is signed by a certificate.

In general, I thought of this analogy. Blockchain is like a chemical process that we cannot see with the naked eye, but we can see something in the microscope. In our case, there were two microscopes. One with YouTube broadcast on the Internet. This is the site observer.mos.ru , made so that anyone can observe or download information from it.

All Friday showed not what really. He showed the turn around the okrugs to the wrong - the turnout there stopped at 12 days.

And the second microscope was powerful - it is called the observer node. We observers with his help could see that everything is going correctly. And we saw that the turnout is growing, and this is just a bug Observer.mos.ru. That is, we saw that it was just the developers of their hands curves, and did not raise a scandal. Unfortunately, I am not a big specialist in the blockchain, and therefore, when I looked at the node during the vote, I could not make out: I show me a chemical process or I look at a small monitor in which an imitation process takes place through a microscope.

- Stop. And what during the vote shows the observer's node?

- She shows the number of those who voted around the districts and some other information. There, some things can be checked. For example, each user has ID, which is available only to the user himself, and by ID, if he told me, you could see whether he voted or not.

- And then would this prove the presence or absence of falsifications?

- No, unfortunately. It could still be a monitor. But it was possible to check the consensus configuration, information about the transaction, they only later told me. We were not worried about this then.

- Why?

- Because even then they did not think about the possibility of falsifications. And there were not even programmers on the site. There was an observer with PRG ( the right of a decisive vote . - Yu. L. ) from the Communist Party Anna Lobonok, coordinator in the Khoroshevsky district. Here she was sent there as a programmer. And there was still an observer with PSG ( the right of an advisory vote . - Yu. L. ) from Makhnitsky, but he is not a programmer at all. And I understood them a little more. But I'm a web programmer. I'm not on the blockchain.

- And now it comes 8 o’clock in the evening.

- As I already mentioned, I generally had confidence in electronic voting, because people who were experts said that everything was honest. I was not particularly worried. And at 9 pm I was not worried. At 9:30 the first results appeared on the MGD ( Moscow City Duma . - Yu. L. ). And we have nothing. We are waiting. Here I see that there are results on MSD. He began to figure out where the results come from. It turns out that an block has appeared on Observer.mos.ru .

And the blockchain-well, simplifiedly speaking, consider that this is an exel table in which each line confirms that all the previous lines have not changed. The blockchain is used so that the entire chain cannot be changed. And in this table, an Observer.mos.ru appears a new line - the results of the elections on the MSD, and I see that pockets ( candidate for the Moscow City Duma . - Yu. L. ) lost. 10 thousand votes are separated in the electron not in his direction. And then I see that the amount of votes is 24 thousand people. And 37 thousand in the district and the turnout of 95 percent were registered.

- How can it be? This is a blockchain.

- I have the same question. I started running everywhere. He ran into the observer’s node, and the chairman of the weekend - Yuri Konstantinovich Pavlov - began to yell at me: “Come out!” I foolishly obeyed him. I still thought that the elections would be more or less honest.

Here it should be explained that for the elections in the State Duma, MD and municipal three electronic weekends were created, and everyone is sitting in three neighboring rooms. In one place. I was PSG from Bryukhanova and Karmanov ( candidate for the Moscow City Duma from Katz. - Yu. L. ). I went to the Chairman of the PEC MGD and say: "Provide me access to the observer’s node." The one: "Well, let's go." And the observer’s node is in the adjacent room with the PEC of the State Duma. We are going with our chairman of the election commission at the MGD, and the Chairman of the PEC for elections to the State Duma says: "Do not let it." Although the weekends are different, my chairman perceived him as the main thing.

Here was my mistake: it was necessary to insist. But I still had confidence that it was just a watchman's syndrome turned on the chairman of the weekend. And I did not reflect. Moreover, I thought that the whole base was available in the survey. In retroactively, nothing could have been changed. We now find those people who downloaded the blockchain during the day, and so far it is the same. Since people constantly download it, it is difficult to replace it. Then I thought that if I went to the node, I would see the same as on Observer.mos.ru .

- And now you don't think so?

- Don't know. Not sure. At half a year, results appear on MD. And they obviously do not converge in the number of votes. I start asking: "How is it?" And at 11 there is a press conference of the head of the public headquarters to observe the elections in Moscow> Venediktov and <the head of the Department for the improvement of the territorial administration and the development of smart projects of the Moscow Government> Kostyrko that the results were posted only for those who voted once. And there are, they say, there are still those who were burning.

“And then you realized that the trouble is?”

- No! I had the impression that the base of people who changed their voice, they just stabbed it. And that the vote is more or less honest. And at one in the morning I find Venediktov and I ask you to provide me with access to the node. Venediktov calls the mass ( head of the headquarters to monitor the progress of electronic voting in Moscow . - Ed. ). He accompanies me to the Noda, and there was a key thing - we were provided with access.

And we began to make requests. And the system does not respond to requests. The request is carried out through Google Chrome. I say: “Let's go to the developer’s panel, where you can look at these requests a little more expanded.”

- What does it mean - more expanded?

- If you are an ordinary user, you press a button, and a request is made, but do not understand how he goes, you just see whether the site has been loading or not. And with the developer panel you can understand who the request was made and what the answer was. The developer panel does not affect the server. The server does not know at all: this panel is open or not. And the programmer says to me: “I can’t. Safety settings. "

That is, he says nonsense, and I understand that he says nonsense, and he knows that I understand this. But he says.

He opened the developer’s panel and says: “I will not make a request, because security.” I say: "Do." He pressed a button, sent a request with an open developer panel.

- AND?

- And he says: "I will not show."

- What happens next?

- I'm starting to scandal. And then there is a central event of the night, which we did not record in the complaint. Here is our big mistake. At two in the morning, Mikhail, an employee of Dita appeared ... ( Department of Information Technology of Moscow . - Yu. L. )

- Dita? I spoke with Denis Shenderovich. Shenderovich said that it seemed to him that this Mikhail was from the FSB. Such ... tightened too for a programmer.

- The FSB was later. We return to the developer panel. Each question from a computer to a computer is signed by a certificate. And Mikhail says: "The Noda certificate has expired at 8 pm."

-Stop-stop! How - eight in the evening? You yourself said that the node is a microscope with which you observe the process. Here the elections ended, the calculation process went, it is - and then the cap slammed the cap slammed?

- Exactly. I ask when there will be a new certificate for the node to work? Mikhail replies: "The FSB is engaged in this, there will be a new certificate, the node will work." We did not write a complaint at this moment, we did not document that there were some kind of FSB certificates. There is only our word. But if they deny that it was, then, then, everything is very bad.

- And what for generally a node - is this microscope a FSB certificate? Somehow suspicious.

- The participation of the FSB is absolutely not necessary here. In the best case, it is dictated by the fact that if the word "cryptography" is written, then the FSB tries to crush everything for himself. We are told: "Certificates will be later." - "When?" - "Within 10 minutes." 10 minutes turn per hour, two, three. The first electronic results appear on the candidate in the State Duma Bryukhanova. Partial. She won "in the fields". And, as I said, at that moment I still thought that this process could not organize normally, but they would count everything honestly. There is a blockchain, a list of submitted ballots - it is fixed, and in it you will be able to find where it happened, how it happened, that with the ballots of people who voted twice. The fact that the number of ballots issued is not equal to the number of records in the blockchain was found only last night. I (and in general, none of the independent observers, as it seems to me now) I figure out how the system with a digging works. I thought that it was “sewn” into the blockchain, and, according to the information available now, it works independently of it, and the blockchain cannot understand which ballots should be taken into account, which are not. Well, I was already terrible, because from 8 am Sunday until 9 pm Monday I did not sleep.

- Stop. You have now said a thing that enduring the brains. Voices raised again - are they separate from the blockchain?! That is, they built a digital fortress around these treasure treasures, they mined everything, put bunks, digital tanks, and then three hundred thousand votes were folded separately from the fortress in the clean field-come in and take it?

- Yes, they are separate. And Kostyrko confirmed this.

- I spoke with one of the programmers who now analyzes the base, and he says that he sees only a million three hundred thousand voted voters - not two million, as officially reported.

- Don't know. I followed only our district. Further by half past four in the morning we understand that everyone scattered. There is no one in general. And no one will give access.

Somewhere by 8 in the morning they bring results. We have not seen who did this. The secretary began to print them. Members of the commission sign them. Closer to 11 in the morning, all copies were printed. And the members of the commission began to travel around the districts so that they entered the data to the GAS-“Elections” system there. I went home, and suddenly at 01:15 the secretary writes to me: “For two hours a new meeting of the WIC Dag is scheduled for me, will you be present?” I turned around and went.

I come-it turns out that in the 201st district they did not take into account the ballots issued by the ballots of the candidate, and there were 112 thousand, but there should be 113 thousand.

And they collect the commission to reload it.

- Stop. How can it be that they did not bring someone? There is an electronic vote. And one computer can send everything itself to another computer. That is, what, write off the data of electronic voting from the screen and enter the ballot by hand?

- Well, there are two explanations. Or their hands are growing out of the wrong place, and they did not write a template that automatically generates the final protocol.

- Or?

“Well, you know how Koib works?” He prints information on the results of voting, and approves their commission. And it happens that if the information is wrong, then the light may turn off at this moment, Koib will become a non -working one, and the ballots will be counted by hand. In line. Here is the same story. The machine may not take into account the subtleties of the moment.

- How can you falsify the blockchain?

- We are now dealing with this.

- What are these 300 thousand people who voted again? Did they vote themselves or were it septied for them?

- I can't answer. What a question takes me still: are all the people registered on Mos.ru - alive? Have you made records for them?

- Ilya, I have such a question. I don’t know a damn about blockchain, except that this is a distributed register. That is, do I understand correctly that the whole essence of the blockchain is that your data is stored on different servers that you do not control, and if you have changed part of these data, other servers see this right away? At the same time, the entire Moscow blockchain is located on 2–4 servers, which are stored in the City Hall of Moscow and the Public Chamber. That is, this is the same blockchain as the Duma - parliament? And can you rewrite it easy? Explain for idiots.

- Look. You can consider blockchain as an exel table. If, to be quite simple, imagine, you have the text of “War and Peace”. And we in it each letter and the sign change to the number. And we summarize them. And the "War and the Peace" will have its own number. Each book will have its own number, and, comparing these numbers, we will see that these are two different books.

- It may happen that they will match?

- Yes. And therefore, mathematicians came up with that it would never match. Instead of the number, they came up with a hash - this is a sequence of 30 letters and numbers. It's like a fingerprint. If we meet two identical fingerprints, then they belong to one person. The hash is a digital fingerprint, which is generated on the basis of information in the file. The sum of the numbers in the War and the World is the easiest hash.

It is impossible to find two different files that would have the same hashes, and it is impossible to invent a file in advance in advance, which would have the same hash.

It's like such a meat grinder. One way you put a bull, and a small cube of meat and lived from the other end. And on the basis of this cube, one can always say, the same this bull or another.

- But you can’t turn the cube back in the bull?

- Yes. The hash is a key piece of blockchain. Blockchain can be perceived as a table in an exole. And one additional column is a hasch of all previous lines. If we make a table, each exel file will have a hash. And if we want the exel file to turn into a blockchain, into the simplest, then we can simply add a new line. We look at all the previous blocks, we take a hash from them, and has sheshes of all previous blocks are stored in a new block. Each block has an information part, and one hash is assigned from the side from all previous blocks.

- Did I realize correctly that even if the blockchain is stored on servers in one place, then it is impossible to rewrite it?

- Perhaps if other people do not have access. But our blockchain was constantly laid out during the elections for the Observer.m.ru, and it cannot be replaced in retroactively.

- But you can blocked or vote for non -existent people?

- This has nothing to do with the blockchain; Mos.ru.

- Ilya, in an electronic vote in Moscow, almost two million signed up. Correctly I understand that you turned out to be the only observer in an electronic weekend who understood something in programming? What if it weren’t for you, then we would not have known anything about it: about the Noda security certificate, which expired at exactly 8 pm, about the FSB? Was there really no other programmers there?

- There was another person who was more aware of me, but he was timid. Programmers are generally unsociable. I only then realized that he was a real observer. And independent. But he was very uncomfortable.

- Why were you so few? Have you thought about the possibility of falsifications?

- Yes. They didn't think. I would have added another important thing. Each block - well, a line in the Excel - everything was laid out online for three days in an encrypted form. And there was a system with encryption keys. The key, with which you can encrypt, generated at 7 in the morning, on Friday, and solemnly divided. At 8 pm, on Sunday, he solemnly connected. During all three days of voting, the ballots were encrypted using this key. At 20.15, on Sunday, this began to be deciphered. Block behind the block. Decoding - it lasts quite a long time. And, accordingly, Observer.mos.ru showed that we have deciphered this block. And, I remind you, about 9 I saw a block with the results of the elections in the MSD on Observer.mos.ru, which did not fight on the amounts of the 19th and 37th districts-the amount did not fight there either, but there the observer was technically ignorant.

Так вот, если вы зайдете на observer.mos.ru — на результаты выборов в Мосгордуму — и кликнете на последние блоки, то вам покажут , что расшифровка последнего блока остановилась в 12:54 21 сентября, совсем недавно. This is fine. Последние блоки он расшифровывал, и там был ноль, как и должно было быть.

А если вы зайдете на результаты выборов в Госдуму и кликните на последние блоки, то вам покажут , что расшифровка закончилась в 21:18 19 сентября.

This cannot be.

DIRECT SPEECH
Алексей Венедиктов мой друг. Он честный и широкий человек. Он первым бросается помочь. Мне омерзительно как те, кому он предоставлял эфиры, слушал и дарил аудиторию, люто травят его. Венедиктов не имеет никакого отношения к манипуляциям. No. И это мы уже выяснили. Позорно кидаться на человека, ладонь которого еще влажна от ваших губ.

Дмитрий Муратов, главный редактор «‎Новой газеты»

From the editorial office
Илья Сухоруков непредвзято и честно выполнил свои гражданские обязательства. Ilya, thanks.