I don’t want to jinx it, but through a joint effort we seem to have managed to deal with the “anomaly on ROI” (the Russian Public Initiative platform), which had caused our vote count to barely increase for ten days straight.
Here is a post by Ilya Massukh, the head of ROI.
We still disagree on the possibility that votes may have been stolen, but I can confirm that ROI, for its part, has followed through on its promises regarding a number of technical measures involving the system.
The chart speaks for itself:
As soon as the technical issues were fixed, votes started coming in at an excellent rate—the same level we had seen before the anomalies appeared.
We are no longer receiving frustrated messages like, “We gave you four votes, refreshed the page, and saw that the total had actually gone down.” That’s good.
What is not so good is that ROI’s counters used to update instantly, and our bots could pull data from them every second, whereas now the counters are cached for a full minute. What happens within that minute is a black box. We believe this reduces trust in the system, and we will continue our dialogue with ROI about changing these rules.
In addition, after discussing the technical details with all the experts, we formulated what we see as the most important demand for ROI: maintaining open voting logs for the past hour (or, better yet, for the entire history). That would fundamentally increase the system’s transparency and give fresh momentum to the development of the platform and of e-democracy in general.
We have established a working relationship; it must be said that ROI responds to emails promptly, and they are willing to meet and discuss things. So, let’s say, we will try to keep working in a constructive and positive mode. The main thing is that the anomalies don’t come back.
Many thanks to everyone who helped raise awareness of the problems with collecting votes, wrote articles, drew attention to the issue, and took part in the discussion.
While we were sorting this out, we lost a lot of time and God knows how many votes. The good news, however, is that we now need only 9,000 more votes, although time is running short.
Now is the time for that final push. I know for sure that plenty of people have been putting off voting with the attitude of, “Why hurry? I’ll still have time.” Don’t put it off any longer.
Vote yourselves, and bring everyone you wanted to bring to vote as well.
Anti-corruption laws won’t deliver themselves to the government.