Challengers of the governing party, United Russia, have formed a coalition to seek an annulment of the recent online elections in Russia in which two blockchain voting systems were trialed.
The opposition communist party along with a number of politicians have called for online voting to be banned, following the Kremlin regaining more than two thirds of the seats in the recent parliamentary election.
Human rights activist and a critic of the Kremlin, Marina Litvinovich, ran in the general election and shared her critique of the election on Facebook:
“On Sept. 17-19, millions of citizens of our country had their votes stolen. That’s why we, candidates for the 8th convocation of the State Duma that represent different political forces, have created a committee for abolishing the online voting,”
The results of the election on Monday gave the United Russia party 49.8% of the vote, a percentage questioned by Kremlin critics, in the context of the online election that swung the vote in favour of the Kremlin.
Almost 2 million votes were cast online, with the results of the online vote not provided for several hours after the polls closed, leading many critics to suggest that there was ample time for tampering. Officially, the reason for the extended time-frame was said to be the result of people who were able to change their votes multiple times, and the time taken was necessary to check that only the final vote was counted.
The opposition communist party noted the following:
“It was originally planned that at 20 o’clock the observers were disconnected from the control over the DEG (online voting system). And in their opinion, everything is fine when the system collapsed from 21 o’clock and showed no signs of life until the morning until they finally posted the results that should have been calculated instantly,”
The international community has also questioned the election results, with the EU, the US, and the UK have condemned the vote. Despite the inclusion of transparent blockchain voting systems, the fact that real distributed blockchains were not used, and ones controlled by election officials were used, places restrictions on any notion of real democracy.
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