Central Election Commission considers moving to a common blockchain platform amid Moscow voting problems

The head of the Public Headquarters for Election Observation in Moscow, Alexey Venediktov proposed to members of the technical working group to recheck the results of the remote electronic voting (DEG), conducted via the city’s blockchain system.

Venediktov urged the publication of all information on online voting in Moscow to be made publicly accessible.

He also asked the Central Election Commission to preserve the “paper trails” of the vote, which are prints of encrypted votes, and to recount the results using them if necessary.

In the Moscow City Election Commission, emphasized that this is not about recounting votes:

«All precinct election commissions, including the DEG PECs, have drawn up the results and signed the final protocols; the results for all Moscow elections are established, and no recount is possible».

Venediktov’s proposal concerns a reconciliation that is informational rather than legal in nature, the Moscow City Election Commission noted.

After the end of the State Duma elections, online voting results in Moscow were published with a delay. Moreover, after processing them, the election results changed. According to counts of standard ballots, in several Moscow districts the opposition candidates led, but after the DEG results were published, the balance changed. changed.

Chairman of the DEG TEC Ilya Massukh explained the delay in tallying results by the possibility of revoting, implemented in the Moscow system.

It allowed voters to change their vote and, according to Venediktov, is a preventive measure against possible voter intimidation during polling.

As noted by Venediktov, about 300,000 voters who used the DEG decided to revote. According to him, the DEG developers even during testing of revoting knew that decoding would take a long time:

«Our fault and misfortune is that we did not talk about this and did not inform voters».

Oleg Artamonov, deputy head of the DEG TEC, in a ForkLog comment said that several parties were to blame. According to him, the city’s Department of Information Technology (DIT), as operator of the Moscow DEG system, did not explain the reasons for the delay “at the moment when it became clear that the counting results would not be soon.”

At the same time, according to him, observers did not work effectively — parties “did not bother inviting observers who are versed in blockchain technologies, cryptographic protections and the DEG architecture”.

«The result — statements that the DIT allegedly rewrote data in the blockchain using a master key could be confirmed by cross-checking the blockchain dump obtained on the observer node and/or in the files at observer.mos.ru, with the final dump now available.»

Independent expert Alexander Isavin told ForkLog that the parties indeed took a passive approach to monitoring the DEG; however, the Moscow mayoralty did not strive to provide conditions for observation:

«An updated document on how to use the observer node was sent a day before or even on the morning of the election day. The DIT did not think about how to confirm the honesty of voting.»

ForkLog requested comment from the DIT, but at the time of writing had not received a response.

Against this backdrop, the head of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova acknowledged that in the future electronic voting could be conducted on a common federal platform. According to her, there were no complaints about the CEC’s blockchain system in other regions, and the results do not raise doubts.

Pamfilova noted that the ability to vote in Moscow on the basis of a separate system only complicated the process:

«Moscow will sort this out itself and then tell the Central Election Commission all the identified nuances. We are waiting for that. Going forward, the situation will change; there will be a single federal platform. We will expand the ability for regions to vote specifically on the common platform».

During the current State Duma elections, two different blockchain systems were used. In Sevastopol, Kursk, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, Murmansk and Rostov regions online voting was conducted on a platform developed by Rostelecom in conjunction with Waves Enterprise for the Central Election Commission; in Moscow — on the platform from the Moscow Department of Information Technology. The latter had previously been criticised by experts.

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