A brief report on our meeting with Ilya Massukh and his colleagues from the Information Democracy Foundation, which runs the Russian Public Initiative (ROI) platform, where we are collecting signatures.
We initiated the meeting for reasons described in detail here. In short: we are seeing anomalies on the ROI website, and it appears to us that votes are being taken away from us. Independent observers confirm our findings.
The Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) was represented at the meeting by Roman Rubanov and Anna Dodonova.
We had two main questions:
(a) the nature of the regular 6-minute intervals in the voting on illicit enrichment and on the football and railway initiatives
(b) the nature of the systematic 6-minute deductions in the voting on illicit enrichment
To the first question, we were told that this was due to the way the counter is cached and that there was nothing unusual about it. When we pointed out that we had conducted more than 20 voting-and-withdrawal tests that did not fall into this interval and were reflected immediately, we were told, “it varies.”
On the second question, in addition to the caching explanation, we were told that there was systematic and malicious voting followed by withdrawal of those votes. To illustrate how these negative adjustments work, we showed a graph with -8 votes on Monday at around 4:30 a.m. within a 2-second span and asked how that was possible. We were told that they themselves did not know the cause.
They cannot identify this kind of problem because they delete a vote as soon as a person withdraws it. Ilya Massukh promised that a solution to this problem would be in place by Wednesday evening.
When we asked them to export the hashes of the SNILS numbers (Russian pension insurance account numbers) of those who had voted—not the SNILS numbers themselves—so that anyone could use simple functions to check whether their vote had been counted, they refused, citing ballot secrecy.
Overall, it seemed to us that Ilya Massukh is interested in developing ROI and increasing public trust in it.
We very much hope everything will be fixed, and once again we urge everyone to cast their vote for our initiative as soon as possible.