Press Release, 5.04.2019

Yelena Dubrovina, head of Yabloko’s Centre for Legislative Initiatives and  member of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party, gave a very negative assessment to the planned introduction of remote voting in elections to the Moscow City Duma – a bill to conduct such an experiment was considered at a meeting of the Moscow Electoral Commission on 2 April.

According to Yelena Dubrovina, introduction of remote voting represents an “evil” in the situation when the government engages administrative resource in full, thus, remote voting can become an instrument of total control over participation of citizens in elections and their votes: “It cannot be ruled out that people will be forced to vote remotely as of their place of work, service or study, while the interested person, let us say, the employer, will be able to control who the citizen voted for, because the voting will take place outside polling stations, without independent observers, without video surveillance”.

Dubrovina also stressed that remote voting via computer or mobile phone, with the help of terminals and bank cards, carried out not so long ago by the Central Electoral Commission of the Russian Federation, failed and the Central Electoral Commission tried to forget about them as soon as possible.

“Now, when the level of voters’s confidence in the elections is extremely low, it is absolutely irresponsible to engage in experiments, especially those that are quite dubious from the point of view of observing anonymity and excluding voting control,” Yelena Dubrovina noted. According to her, it is necessary to clear the election process of fraudulent technologies that have been used in elections: pressure on voters by employers, the so-called “carousels” [when one person votes several times], forced voting and fraud with lists of voters. This should be resolved.

“It is impossible to run after a voter with a ballot box or invent other tricks, so that to create a façade of mass participation in the elections. The voter must be respected, rather than treated as a lazy and low-minded person who needs patronizing.

The voter does not go to the polling stations, not because he or she is too lazy to walk a few hundred meters, but because he or she does not believe that his or her future depends on his or her participation in the elections. The task of the authorities and electoral commissions is to prove the opposite”.