On September 17, a three-day voting started in Russia. The whole country (as well as residents of the “DPR” and “LPR” with RF passports) elects State Duma deputies, 39 regions elect local assemblies, and 12 subjects elect governors. This is not only the first long parliamentary elections, but also the first electoral process in 30 years without OSCE observers. Even before the elections, the Justice Ministry and the courts removed dozens of opposition candidates, and the CEC abandoned public video surveillance, leaving only accredited individuals able to view the cameras. True, all this did not prevent the registration of massive stuffing and «roundabout» at the sites.
Pressure on IT giants and blocking from Pavel Durov
In the early morning of September 17, along with the opening of polling stations in central Russia, users noticed the loss of the Navalny app from Google Play and the App Store. It was in this application that recommendations on «Smart Voting» were published, through which Navalny's team intended to change the usual course of parliamentary elections.
According to Apple's official response, the reason for blocking the application was the recognition of FBK as an extremist organization in Russia. According to Roskomnadzor and the Prosecutor General's Office, the application contains «content banned in Russia» and «allows you to interfere in elections.»
The blocking took place the day after the visit to the meeting of the commission for the protection of sovereignty in the Federation Council of the Russian Federation of representatives of Apple (from her lawyers Baker McKenzie went) and Google (who represented this corporation is unknown). On September 16, Deputy Head of the International Committee of the Federation Council and FSB General Vladimir Dzhabarov threatened employees of Google and Apple offices with criminal prosecution. According to the NYT, real criminal cases threatened very specific employees of IT giants, and therefore the American bigtech retreated before the Russian parliament.
A few days before the elections, IT specialists recorded attacks on the site and the Smart Voting telegram bot, as well as the blocking of Google Docs and other services through which Navalny's team disseminated their recommendations. Experts believe that Roskomnadzor has been training to filter traffic and deliver targeted attacks on infrastructure, using the tools of the «sovereign Internet».
Around midnight, Pavel Durov announced that the Telegram messenger would restrict the work of bots associated with the election campaign. From 00:30 Moscow time on September 18, the Smart Voting bot stopped working.
“Since the election campaign in Russia has come to an end and the election process itself has begun, the so-called 'days of silence' are beginning — a tradition enshrined in the laws of many countries that provides for the absence of campaigning during the elections themselves,” Durov said. «We consider this practice legitimate and urge Telegram users to respect it.»
“During this pre-election cycle, Telegram managed to protect the freedom of speech in Russia to the maximum, but the future is uncertain,” the entrepreneur noted separately.
Bastrykin and DDoS
In addition to face-to-face elections, electronic voting is taking place in seven regions of Russia: Moscow, Sevastopol, as well as Kursk, Murmansk, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov and Yaroslavl regions. This year, residents of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR with Russian passports were also given the opportunity to vote online.
The turnout for electronic voting in Moscow was 58%, that is, more than a million citizens. In the regions by evening, the online turnout reached 60-70%.
The CEC and the Public Chamber, as in previous years, claim that DDoS attacks on online voting services took place all day. The OP separately noted that the attacks came from servers in the United States, Saudi Arabia, China and European countries. More than 100 attacks were allegedly repelled in Moscow alone.
The head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin, immediately ordered an inspection of «cyberattacks from abroad» to be organized.
Stuffing and coercion in St. Petersburg (and not only)
According to official data from the CEC, turnout at polling stations on the first day across the country was 16.85%. The leaders in terms of turnout were Chechnya (27.27%), Tyva (26.3%) and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (25.49%). The least enthusiasm was shown by residents of Khakassia (5.89%), as well as Novosibirsk (6.54%) and Yaroslavl (6.83%) regions.
Also, residents of the “DPR” and “LPR” were brought by bus to the regions of the Rostov region bordering on Ukraine to vote in the Russian elections. «Caucasian Knot» reports that some of them were given Russian passports right before the elections. Observers were not allowed into the border zones, the Novaya Gazeta correspondent reported.
From the very morning, observers and journalists recorded a mass drive to the areas of the military from Primorye to St. Petersburg and Moscow. In the capital, a large queue has formed at the site in Bolshoy Afanasyevsky Lane, to which voters are assigned, registered at the address of the reception office of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
Servicemen are voting in an organized manner in St. Petersburg. Photo: Elena Lukyanova / «Novaya Gazeta»
In a conversation with a correspondent for the British Telegraph, several people from the queue admitted that they had come under duress as Ministry employees. In addition, today employees of budgetary institutions reported on the demands of their superiors to report on the voting in the morning. Similar messages from readers came to the editorial office of Novaya Gazeta. The CEC received 98 complaints of voting coercion in the first day.
The “Voice” movement (included in the register of “foreign agents” movements) counted 2,130 possible violations throughout the country. 382 of them are in Moscow, 171 are in St. Petersburg. Basically, this is a violation of the rights of observers (according to OVD-info, 10 observers or members of commissions were detained), the use of administrative resources, as well as violations when handling safe packets (ballots should be stored there during voting out of the reach of potential falsifiers), lack of bottom at the safes on the sites or the absence of the safes themselves.
A large number of videos with violations and stuffing were published by journalists and observers from St. Petersburg:
- at polling station No. 1991 in Pavlovsk (Pushkin district of St. Petersburg), when inspecting the safe, observers from the Yabloko party found filled safe packages.
- near St. Petersburg police station # 2189, the police detained a woman with a bag containing 145 allegedly fake ballots. It turned out to be a member of PEC # 2189 with an advisory vote. The PEC explained this by the fact that the ballots were counted outside the precinct and forgotten there, and the woman was sent to pick up the papers.
- Navalny's colleague Irina Fatyanova caught a young man in one of the St. Petersburg polling stations, throwing in a bundle of ballots. He confessed everything on record.
- at polling station No. 1992, the observers were not allowed to inspect the safe, where, presumably, ballots that had already been filled in were lying. After the conflict, the observers and the commission received a message about the alleged mining of the building.
- the court removed from polling station No. 2188 a member of the commission with an advisory vote, Tatyana Kosinova, who reported about the «carousel» — young people came to the site who claimed to be registered at 1 Gangutskaya — where the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad is located.
In addition, the observers from the organization «Independent Public Monitoring» in St. Petersburg were given instructions with «obligatory duties» on the coverage of the elections. The compilers of the manuals offered to report on the positive aspects of the elections — for example, that a cat entered the polling station.
True, there were no reports of cats for the whole day. But at a polling station in Moscow, the police caught a raccoon.
And there was also a dog! Photo: Elena Lukyanova / «Novaya Gazeta»
Voted (whether) Putin
At about 15:00 Moscow time, the Kremlin pool circulated a video showing Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin voting remotely. Later, at about 4:30 pm, a tape appeared with President Vladimir Putin, who also participated in the electronic voting, being officially in self-isolation. True, if in the case of Mishustin, almost all stages of voting (acceptance of conditions and affixing marks in both ballots) were recorded, the video with Putin confused users of social networks.
The President approached the computer with the browser already running, for some reason pressed the keys on the letter keyboard, and then the viewers saw the page elec.moscow/ballot/success with the inscription “Thank you, your vote has been taken into account!”. Any visitor to this page can see such an inscription without voting.
The video with Putin missed the moment of the necessary authentication via SMS. Back on September 3, the president publicly stated that he did not have a mobile phone, which means that he could hardly receive a confirmation code for his personal number. The Kremlin tried to explain this discrepancy of facts by the fact that Putin used his assistant's phone.
Whether Putin has a mos.ru account or a government services portal remains unclear. In social networks, they paid attention to the fact that it is impossible to find such an account using the personal TIN of Vladimir Putin (this is open data).