We demand the immediate annulment of the results of the so-called “electronic voting.”
From the very beginning, it was obvious: electronic voting, cooked up by City Hall for these Moscow City Duma elections, was an utterly idiotic, fraudulent scheme. It had no purpose whatsoever except to test-drive yet another method of stuffing votes for United Russia. We came up with a new way to take down United Russia candidates (“Smart Voting”), and they responded by inventing a new way to rig elections.
Absolutely everything about electronic voting is wrong. Starting with the fact that it was conceived, promoted, and organized by the Moscow mayor’s office. Which is absurd. Moscow City Hall is the main interested party and the main beneficiary of falsification and of United Russia’s victory. And ending with the fact that the process itself and the technical infrastructure, hastily thrown together by who knows whom, performed in the most disgraceful way possible. Glitches, breakdowns, hacked encryption codes, total opacity, and no way to verify the results. The whole thing was organized at the level of voting for “Miss Prom 2009,” not elections to the capital’s parliament that are of fundamental importance.
And of course, the crowning disgrace of this whole ugly spectacle was the results.
In all three districts where electronic voting was used, the United Russia candidates won. In all three, with anomalously high results. People do not show up at polling stations to vote for United Russia candidates, but online suddenly everyone wanted to—sure, of course.
As claimed by one of the main lobbyists for electronic voting, Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow (a Russian radio station), the average age of an electronic voter was 32. If that is true, then it is twice as suspicious: these are young voters who like the internet. Why would they suddenly start supporting United Russia even more strongly than older voters who physically came to the polling station?
Electronic voting is a fraudulent scam from beginning to end. It is not some “new advanced technology” at all—it is a system for ballot-stuffing that is even more brazen and obvious than what happens at polling stations. But at least at a polling station the fraudsters have to make an effort (hide in the bathroom, run off into the night with ballots); here, they do not have to do anything at all. You just write in the result you need, and that is that. You see a United Russia candidate is losing, and with one stroke you add a couple hundred votes—after all, it is impossible to check.
That is exactly how the Moscow mayor’s office stole a seat from opposition candidate Roman Yuneman in District 30.
The issue of “electronic voting” must be settled now. It must be abolished and never used again for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, before long the authorities will use their “unique blockchain” to falsify an entire election—for example, the State Duma election.
What do the creators of “electronic voting” (the mayor’s office) want least of all? For anyone to be able to verify the results. That is why they have systematically rejected every form of external oversight of the process. Despite promises of complete transparency, there is currently no way to recount how many votes were cast for whom. Even a voter who cast a ballot electronically cannot verify whether their own vote was counted at all. Maybe it was, maybe it was not. Maybe it went to the right candidate, or maybe to someone else entirely.
And we have obtained what the Moscow mayor’s office guards like the apple of its eye: the full list of voters who registered and were approved to vote. The names, dates of birth, phone numbers, and email addresses of 12,000 people. Every one of whom can be called or messaged and asked, “Who did you vote for, and did you vote at all?”
City Hall’s way of protecting this list is almost comical. For example, they told Roman Yuneman, who was deprived of victory by the United Russia candidate, that they could not provide the list because “it had been moved to the archive.” A text file had been moved to the archive.
Archived or not, no matter. Here is a fragment of it. Each entry contains a full name, date of birth, SNILS number (Russian pension insurance number), phone number, email address (with rare exceptions), and the date of registration on Gosuslugi (Russia’s state services portal).
We received the list as an unencrypted text file. The personal data of 12,000 Muscovites. Naturally, we checked it by spot-checking. We already knew several names of “electronic” voters ourselves, Roman Yuneman sent us several more, we found some on Twitter, and we also checked people who had publicly written that they had voted.
It was a 100% match. Everyone who said they had voted online was on the list.
The very fact that this list ended up in our hands proves once again that the “electronic voting” system does not come close to meeting the required level of security. It is full of holes. It cannot even guarantee the safety of voters’ personal data.
Of course, we will not publish the entire list. However, we believe we are entitled to hand it over to candidate Yuneman so that he can organize a proper and honest verification of the electronic voting results. The phone numbers are there, the email addresses are there—that is more than enough.
In addition, we are ready to hand over the list of voters to the three new opposition factions in the Moscow City Duma: the Communists, YABLOKO, and A Just Russia, so that they can examine it as part of parliamentary oversight and an investigation.
Electronic voting has been compromised and must be abolished.