Russia’s test blockchain voting criticised for lack of transparency

About 200,000 Russians were unable to participate in testing of the nationwide blockchain-based online voting due to the CEC’s refusal. This is сообщают Open Media with reference to co-chair of the movement ‘Golos’ Grigory Melkonyants.

According to the Central Election Commission, applications to participate in the testing via Gosuslugi and the Moscow mayor’s site подали 2.5 million people. But on the day the vote began, the number registered on the election portal stood at 2.33 million people.

«То есть почти 200 тысяч желающих по каким-то причинам не были зарегистрированы», – констатировал Мельконьянц.

Data: Open Media.

Deputy chairman of the CEC, Nikolay Bulaev, explained the refusals by citizens providing incorrect data during registration. However the system’s technical support cited other reasons:

• Inability to reconcile information from the voter’s personal cabinet on the Gosuslugi portal with the CEC’s voter register;
• Submitting multiple applications to participate in online voting (in this case the citizen is not allowed to vote at all);
• The voter did not pass the “random sampling” selection (the most common reason).

“No lottery-based principles were announced by the organizers for the testing of the vote,” emphasized Grigory Melkonyants.

The CEC confirmed problems with registration, but did not disclose the total number of refusals.

“A number of users who had expressed a desire to participate, unfortunately, received automated notifications that they were not admitted to this stage of voting. Such people are few overall, but they exist,” said the commission chair Ella Pamfilova.

Also, обратил внимание that testing, which was planned to begin at 08:00 MSK on 12 May, started overnight.

Data: Telegram channel of Grigory Melkonyants.

The CEC described the published screenshot as “not corresponding to reality.” They added that overnight there was “internal testing,” which involved 38 people, as seen in the published screenshot.

Overall, electronic voting became less controllable and transparent than in 2020, according to Melkonyants.

“Currently, it is not possible to download blockchain transactions, there is no source data for analysis, and as a result we cannot assess whether the system’s testing is proceeding correctly or at all. Observers have no way to monitor the transparency of the elections because we do not see how the system works from inside,” said the Golos co-chair.

The CEC did not react to Golos’s recommendations, because, according to Melkonyants, “the CEC is satisfied with a system in which no one can understand anything.”

He added that the process is not protected from administrative pressure: in some regions for testing as many as 4% of voters registered — “that is suspiciously high”.

The pilot remote voting takes place across all regions of Russia from 12 to 14 May. It will be applied in the September 2021 elections in Moscow and in five more regions to be determined later.

The blockchain voting system developed by Rostelecom and Waves Enterprise. In August 2020 it underwent a technological test.

Previously, for the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections and the 2020 vote on constitutional amendments, a blockchain system developed by the Moscow Department of Information Technology was used. In both cases it failed.

In September 2020, during Moscow’s municipal elections, the monitoring system for the electronic voting for about 16 hours published excerpts from the blockchain system with distorted data.

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