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Russia seeks to silence allegations of electoral fraud with a review of Moscow's electronic vote

2021-09-23T21:54:23.804Z


The Electoral Commission refuses to carry out a remote recount of the votes, which swept the rivals of Putin's party at the last minute


The accusations of electoral fraud in the legislatures this weekend in Russia do not stop. Regarding the complaints of filling of ballot boxes or carousels of voters who passed to deposit the ballot more than once, the complaints about electronic voting in Moscow stand out. The pioneering telematic suffrage radically changed the landscape in the capital at the last moment and led to a landslide victory there for Vladimir Putin's party. United Russia, the government formation, swept its rivals into neighborhoods of traditionally oppositional ideology, prompting the opposition's alert and accusations of fraud. The Electoral Commission of Moscow - the territory where more allegations of fraud have surfaced - announced this Wednesday that an audit of the electronic voting process will be carried out, but that this will not be binding;neither will a recount be made, as the opponents claim.

The Moscow authorities have not clarified how the review will be carried out, which will be carried out by the civil commission created before the elections to observe the development of electronic voting and which includes people such as Alexei Venediktov, director of the critical radio station Echo of Moscow , which has tried to promote

online

suffrage

, or a representative of the specialized electoral monitoring group Golos, who already warned before the elections that the system could favor fraud and who has criticized the opacity of digital voting in the capital, which it registered 1.8 million electronic votes.

The Kremlin, which has ensured that the parliamentary elections, marked by the repression of dissent and the veto of prominent opponents to attend, were developed with "competitiveness, transparency and fairness", has been quick to praise the decision of the "verification" of the vote in Moscow. "This increases the level of confidence in the election results," said Dmitri Peskov, spokesman for President Putin. "It is a demonstration of absolute transparency," he insisted.

Six regions of Russia have launched electronic voting in the weekend's parliamentary elections, in which Putin's party has revalidated its parliamentary majority (324 of 450 seats; 10 less than the last legislature).

All but Moscow have used a federal platform and published their data on Sunday night, hours after the face-to-face and digital polls closed.

The data from the capital, which has experimentally used its own platform that gave, for example, the option of changing the vote every three hours after depositing it for the first time and until the polls closed, only arrived in the afternoon of the day after.

A highly controversial delay that has already raised the suspicions of the opposition.

Putin, in front of the computer he voted on online last Friday, the Kremlin announced.

Electronic voting in the capital circled nine electoral districts, in which opposition deputy candidates led by a big difference. Most are representatives of the communist party, independent or liberal, who were on the

tactical voting

list

, called

smart voting

,

drawn up by the team of the jailed Russian opponent Alexei Navalni, which recommended the candidate with the best chance of defeating that of United Russia. A list also in the form of a digital application banned by the Russian authorities, who have declared the entities linked to Navalni "extremist organizations", and blocked by Internet giants such as Google or Apple after pressure from the Kremlin.

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Anastasia Bryukhanova, an independent candidate for the Duma (lower house of Parliament) and one of the candidates who were winning by a lot until the

online

vote arrived

, has already filed a formal complaint with the Electoral Commission. "We still don't know how it happened," says his campaign manager, Maxim Kaz, "but the results of the expression of will are distorted." Bryukhanova, one of those recommended by Navalni and a huge favorite in her district, is aware that her complaint will probably not yield any results. "We will sue, we will demand the cancellation of the results, but in Russia generally the results are not canceled," says Kaz, who points out that the judicial process that may derive from his complaint and the appearance of the members of the team that managed the

online

vote

Yes it can help you find answers.

The hovering questions about the process are why the dissemination of the results was delayed so long, or why there were no independent observers in the final minute of voting and in

Moscow's

online

vote count

.

They had been authorized, but their permission to attend virtually expired just as the polls closed.

Something "in line with the process," said Artyom Kostyrko, deputy director of the Department of Information Technologies of the Moscow City Council, who in a seminar on

online

voting

this Wednesday has ensured that once the voting process has been completed and the reception of votes is closed, "observation is not necessary."

Navalni's team speaks of "massive fraud"

Navalni's allies speak of "massive fraud" and even the Communist Party has insisted that it does not recognize the results of the online vote. The historic political formation, traditionally considered loyal to the government on substantial issues, called a small protest on Monday in the capital and has announced more mobilizations. But to the incessant complaints and accusations from the opposition and observers such as Golos and independent scientists, the Russian authorities have simply responded with the innocuous announcement of the audit. "Once the results of the vote have been established, only a court has the right to decide on a recount," said the vice president of the Election Commission of the city of Moscow, Dmitry Reut, "so no recount is possible." .

Although the announced audit is not binding, Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of the electoral monitoring organization Golos and a member of the civil commission that will conduct the audit, believes it is a step forward. "It is a good thing, an advance, although it is not foreseen that it will have legal consequences, what we detect could serve as a legal basis for future actions," says the expert. Golos was declared a "foreign agent" by the Russian authorities and can now only act as an observer as a guest of political parties and official organizations.

The president of the Electoral Commission, Ella Pamfilova, has announced that Moscow's specific telematic voting platform will not be used in the future. Only the federal electronic voting platform will be used, he said, which has worked in the regions of Nizhny Novgorod, Kursk, Yaroslav, Murmansk, Rostov, in addition to Ukraine's Sevastopol, annexed by Russia in 2014. In recent times Russia has given the nationality to tens of thousands of people residing in the Ukrainian territories of Donetsk and Lugansk, self-proclaimed republics and where an armed conflict develops between the forces of Kiev and the pro-Russian separatists supported militarily and politically by the Kremlin. Those people with new Russian citizenship were also able to vote

online

.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-09-23

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