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From 17 to 19 September, voting will take place on the elections of deputies of the State Duma, and Muscovites will also elect deputies of the Moscow City Duma in the 19th and 37th constituencies and deputies of the Shchukino municipal district. Moscow authorities actively urge citizens to vote online and even raffle apartments and cars among the registered.
The electronic voting system does not fit into existing legislation, explains Alexander Isavnin, a professor at the Free University. For more than two years he has been following the development of Remote Electronic Voting (DEG) systems in Russia on behalf of the Pirate Party. To preserve the secrecy of voting, the law 67-FZ stipulates special measures: the same type of ballots, booths, a ban on recording the actions of the voter at the polling station. However, the e-newsletters are numbered, which is against the law.
The Moscow Department of Information Technologies (DIT) and Rostelecom are responsible for remote voting. Formally, both systems are created taking into account the principle of “two agencies”: one issues ballots, and the other counts votes. To ensure the secrecy of the vote, it is important that the parties cannot exchange information. However, in reality, DIT and Rostelecom combine their functions by issuing and counting ballots.
User authorization on the state portals ESIA and mos.ru, issuing ballots and accepting voter votes, presupposes anonymity. However, the comparison of the logs of the web servers that carried out the authorization allows DIT and Rostelecom to unmistakably “tie” the received voice to the user who sent it, warns Isavnin. The web server logs contain the IP address, browser version, operating system version and other data that can be used to de-anonymize the voter. “It’s hard to say that this was deliberately done to violate, but the conditions for anonymity not to be violated are not met,” Isavnin told The Insider.
The DEG developers emphasize that they use blockchain technology to encrypt data. But before entering the blockchain, the voice is stored in an architectural element called the Message queue. Thus, the use of blockchain does not protect against deanonymization.
“The systems are not programmed by those who are immersed in the electoral system. Such developers are not very concerned with the topic of the secrecy of voting, the topic of election observation. They need to satisfy their bosses, ”says Isavnin. Over the course of two years, he repeatedly drew the attention of DEG developers to these vulnerabilities, but in response, according to him, he received “either an obvious lie or propaganda.” One of the replies noted that a loophole with violation of the secrecy of the vote exists only in theory. “Until it is proven in court that it was used, then you should not pay attention to it,” the developers said.
Due to the fact that the source codes and documentation for the electronic voting system are not published, experts suspect that the DEG may also contain specially embedded identifiers for tracking voters. Even the documents published by the CEC to describe the structure of the DEG do not allow evaluating the mechanism of electronic voting itself. For example, information was released that four Rostelecom data centers are used to account for votes. “Does this somehow convince you that it is safe?” – Alexander Isavnin asks a rhetorical question.
According to him, all work on Russian electronic voting systems “seriously contradicts the basic principles of holding elections (secrecy, observation, publicity), the principles of adopting socially significant regulations, the principles of developing and testing information systems.”
Also, remote voting does not allow to control the voter list, which leads to the appearance of “dead souls”. In fact, manipulations with the ballots are carried out by a very wide circle of unknown persons, who also have access to the personal data of the voter, Isavnin notes. According to him, under the pretext of forming a system of “electronic democracy”, the authorities of the Russian Federation are imposing a “digital gulag”.
The introduction of an electronic voting system should take place after the democratization of the electoral system, and not before it, says the founder of Roskomsvoboda Stanislav Shakirov. Otherwise, “an electronic voting system may turn out, which produces any result entered into it in advance, and this cannot be verified.” “At all key nodes, the system should be controlled by public organizations and non-profit associations of citizens interested in the honesty of observation,” he stressed.
Stanislav Shakirov added that “technologically, it has been possible to build a system of fair electronic voting for a long time already”. But a number of democratic countries, for example Germany and Finland, did not take this path. “They just decided that it was quite difficult for them to build these public institutions that would control electronic voting at every stage. There is nothing unsolvable, but it is quite difficult, ”Shakirov said.
The Moscow authorities are introducing electronic voting not only as an experimental alternative to conventional voting. Officials expect that online voting will become massive in the next elections. At the same time, by increasing the number of those wishing to vote via the Internet, Moscow expects to receive a higher percentage of votes for United Russia, noted two interlocutors of RBC close to the mayor’s office.
Alexei Venediktov, head of the Public Headquarters for Election Observation in Moscow and editor-in-chief of Echo Moskvy reportedthat more than half of the capital’s voters will take part in electronic voting. In total, there are about 7.5 million people. On the morning of August 21, According to him, 819 thousand Muscovites have already registered (11% of all voters).
In early August, the Republic edition reportedthat the management of the structures accountable to the mayor’s office (Mosgortrans, Mosmetro, Moskollektor, etc.) is forcing employees to submit applications for electronic voting, report this, and also provide the data of three relatives and friends with a Moscow residence permit, who will also have to vote electronically.
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