Media: Moscow’s blockchain voting system published distorted data for about 16 hours

The surveillance system monitoring the progress of electronic voting in Moscow’s municipal elections malfunctioned. As a result, for about 16 hours, extracts from the blockchain system were published with distorted data, according to Open Media.

In the downloaded reports on the course of the vote, journalists found “dozens of anomalous records.” Such extracts are produced every half-hour.

“Errors in the reports began to appear on the night of September 11 and appeared in every extract until 17:00 on September 12, a few hours before the end of voting — thus, about half of all files that were supposed to reflect the ‘blockchain snapshot’ contained errors and missing votes,” the newspaper notes.

Viktor Tolstoguzov, head of the Department of Electronic Voting Systems at Bauman Moscow State Technical University, said that part of the data in the extracts was missing. Later, some extracts changed in size, and the published intermediate files disappeared, he noted.

As Open Media reports, after September 13 the Moscow Department of Information Technology (DIT), which developed the system, replaced the extracts without explanation.

Artem Kostyrko, head of the Moscow government’s Smart Projects Department, told journalists that the files “had not changed in any part.”

Earlier, he stated that, according to data from the blockchain, “which were broadcast online in real time throughout the voting, one could determine that there was no hacking, ballot-stuffing or stoppage of voting.”

According to Dmitry Nesterov, a member of the technical working group and an election-monitoring expert, such incidents significantly undermine trust in such systems:

“Even if a technically simple element of the remote voting system check is subjected to manual interference, and the situation is not publicly disclosed nor adequately explained, it is hard to expect that a voter will trust that there was no interference, for example at the stage of recording votes or when compiling the voter list.”

The memo reminds that the DIT’s blockchain system was used last year for elections to the Moscow City Duma, and in 2020 for the constitutional amendments referendum. In both cases it failed.

Earlier, ForkLog’s experts discussed the system’s technical characteristics and chief vulnerabilities.

Experts discuss risks of blockchain voting for constitutional amendments in Russia

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