Russian programmer Pyotr Zhizhin spoke about a possible method of falsifying the results of the remote electronic voting (DEG) held in Moscow in the elections to the State Duma on September 17-19. Novaya Gazeta published an interview with him on Sunday, October 17th.
Zhizhin analyzed the source code of the DEG system. According to the programmer’s conclusions, there are two blockchains in it – a public one, which stores the vote cast by a voter, and a closed one, where a special number called group_id (an identifier of a group of ballots from one voter) falls, which is the same for all revotes of this voter.
According to Zhizhin, the stuffing could be carried out in such a way that votes from bots were recorded in the public blockchain, and after the voting was over, “chimerical” lines could fit into the “private” blockchain, in which the field corresponding to the voter was taken from real people from other lines private blockchain. In this case, the field corresponding to the vote for a certain candidate is taken from the “thrown” ballot from the public blockchain.
DIT published the wrong code that was used in the elections
The programmer found out that the code published by the Moscow Department of Information Technology (DIT) did not match the one that was launched in the elections: the time during which re-voting was available was increased for the elections. In addition, during the work of the program, a simple table with voter data was recorded, which is not provided for by the law and the procedure for conducting the DEG and information about which is absent in the DEG documentation.
Petr Zhizhin found a “hole” in the blockchain source code that allows the “revoted” ballots to be considered valid – he experimentally discovered a “window” through which any information can be entered into the blockchain with the election organizer’s key. This key was controlled by the DIT of Moscow, the programmer noted.
On the eve of the headquarters of the former candidate for the State Duma from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Mikhail Lobanov released a report in which he studied a possible scheme of stuffing during electronic voting in elections in the Kuntsevo single-mandate constituency. Lobanov’s team found more than 9,000 suspicious voices that could have been thrown in. At the same time, the gap between the Communist candidate and his rival from United Russia, Yevgeny Popov, according to the official election results, was just over 8,000 votes. According to the results of voting at polling stations, Lobanov was ahead of Popov.
The Communist Party did not recognize the results of electronic voting in Moscow
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation did not recognize the results of electronic voting in the elections to the State Duma in Moscow, calling it a “threat to national security” and accusing the authorities of “outraging the will of the people.” Representatives of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation have filed lawsuits with the Presnensky District Court, in which they challenge the results of the DEG in the capital.
On September 20 and 25, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation held rallies in Moscow to cancel the results of electronic voting.
According to the officially approved results of the State Duma elections, the United Russia party won.
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