CONVENIENCE OF TECHNOLOGY
“Anyone who has tried remote voting at least once will not vote any other way. It’s like saying that communication via landline is more convenient and reliable than via smartphone,” says political scientist Konstantin Kostin.
And the majority of Muscovites agree with him: since 8 am on the first day of voting in the capital, 1.8 million people have voted, 110,000 of them at polling stations using electronic voting terminals and only 60.4 thousand of them “traditionally” using paper ballots.
“We announced and warned in advance through publications on various platforms and in the media that the main form of this voting is electronic,” said the head of the Moscow Election Commission Olga Kirillova. – Those who wanted to vote “on paper” wrote a statement before September 2. But there were still cases when people “did not hear” and “did not know”. We prepared enough ballots in advance and the commissions did everything possible to resolve these situations without conflicts. So that all citizens can exercise their right to vote.
And yet, digital will one day replace paper – the head of VTsIOM, Valery Fedorov, is sure of this:
– Electronic voting is still viewed with caution in the country as a whole. Moscow – the capital introduced it earlier, so residents are already used to it. But I think that in the future paper ballots will become as archaic as the things that we once considered necessary: landlines and pagers.
RELIABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY
“On the first day, there were 120 attacks on the e-learning system, all of which were repelled, and the system is functioning normally,” said the head of the Public Electoral Observation Office.
Throughout the day, the voting process was monitored not only in person at polling stations, but also remotely, via cameras, by specially trained observers from the Electoral Observation Center.
They will also keep watch at night: the observers work 24 hours a day and are replaced every two hours.
Polling stations closed at 8 pm and will open only at 8 am on September 7.
But as they say, Moscow never sleeps and online voting continues.
Tomorrow morning we will know how many residents of the capital will decide to participate in the elections that evening.
BY THE WAY
Head of State Vladimir Putin, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin also opted for electronic voting today.
And the pilot-cosmonaut, Hero of Russia Anton Shkaplerov said that he had to vote twice in the presidential elections of the Russian Federation in outer space.
“I was the only Russian there once, so the turnout outside the planet Earth was 100%,” he smiled. – Jokes aside, voting electronically is very convenient, I have already seen that.
AND AT THIS MOMENT
In addition to the elections to the Moscow City Duma, Muscovites will also elect municipal deputies in Kurkino and Novy Moscow on September 6-8, so local residents have not one, but two ballots. On the first day, a total of 124,737 were cast, of which 2,099 were paper.
