Press Release, 15.09.2022

On 2 September, a week before the single day of voting in the municipal elections in Moscow, the Yabloko party proposed to install one of the remote electronic voting nodes on its equipment. Access to such a node provides control over the distributed storage and immutability of votes.

At the moment, the connection to the node has not been provided, the last technical interaction of IT specialists from the Yabloko party with the Department of Information Technology of Moscow was at 6 a.m. on the first day of voting on 9 September. On the part of Yabloko, all the technical requirements put forward by the organisers of the vote have been met.

However, according to the speech of Artyom Kostyrko, head of the technical group of developers of electronic voting in the Central Electoral Commission, the connection to the node was made for the ruling United Russia and the New People political parties.

Yabloko IT specialists note that even after summing up the results of the elections, such a connection will provide an opportunity to make sure that the observation portal, which is actually a derivative of the blockchain node data, was working correctly.

“In addition to the fact that we still have not received access to the node of the electronic voting system, we have generally been illegally deprived of the opportunity to carry out any kind of monitoring of this procedure. On 5 September, in accordance with the current legislation, the Moscow branch of Yabloko submitted to the Moscow State Electoral Commission a list of observers for remote electronic voting, however, on voting days, access to observation at the Moscow City Electoral Commission, as prescribed by the “Requirements for holding remote electronic voting” approved by the Central Electoral Commission, was not organised. The observation of the remote electronic voting at the Public Headquarters, represented only a simulation. Voting statistics (when more than a million Muscovites voted on the first day), as well as numerous signals about the non-free expression of the will of voters, once again give reason to assert that the remote electronic voting is a completely illegal procedure that must be canceled,” Alexander Efimov, head of the federal headquarters for control over the elections of the Yabloko party, commented.

Yabloko also analysed the election results at real polling stations, and those taking into account the remote voting, and came to the conclusion: mandates of many Yabloko candidates were taken away with the help of the remote electronic voting, which Yabloko did not have a possibility to observe.