What’s Wrong with Electronic Voting? Russia’s Latest Controversial Experience

Most election analysts remain skeptical about the prospect of introducing online voting in Ukraine. Russia’s recent experience only reinforces these doubts.

Moving Forward

Ukraine’s Election Code and the Law on Popular Sovereignty through the All-Ukrainian Referendum already outline procedures related to electronic vote counting, digital document management for election commissions, and the creation of electronic vote-counting protocols.

However, these procedures exist only on paper. There is no regulatory framework to support them, and Ukraine has no real experience with electronic voting, not even at a pilot level. There was an attempt to introduce it in the 2020 local elections, but as it turned out, the Central Election Commission (CEC) was not ready. In January 2020, CEC Chairman Oleh Didenko made it clear in an interview that discussions about implementing internet voting in Ukraine were premature—at least for now.

Yet, according to some sources, active legal, technical, and organizational efforts are already underway within the President’s Office, the Ministry of Digital Transformation, and the CEC to prepare for electronic voting in the next parliamentary and presidential elections. Reportedly, special attention has been given to analyzing Russia’s latest online voting experience.

There is no limit to perfection

Russia has already ventured into online voting. The project, known as DEG (Remote Electronic Voting), was first tested during the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections in three districts via the official website of the Moscow mayor’s office. Even then, election analysts raised concerns about a “hybrid administrative resource,” warning that technical manipulations with electronic voting had helped pro-government candidates secure victory.

Between 2019 and 2021, Russian authorities refined and deployed a large-scale technological scheme to distort election results under the guise of innovative digital voting. In September 2021, electronic voting was expanded to cover all of Moscow (where there is a critical mass of voters prepared to vote for opposition candidates) and an additional six regions, including the occupied Ukrainian city of Sevastopol.

On the surface, the system appeared straightforward for voters. Citizens logged into a special portal (similar to Ukraine’s Diia platform) using a pre-verified account, submitted a request to vote remotely, and during the designated voting period—extended to three days under the pretext of the pandemic—received an electronic ballot.

Non-Moscow residents voted via a national federal platform, while Muscovites used a separate municipal platform, mos.ru. And it was this municipal platform where the real “miracles” occurred on election night.

Out of Moscow’s 7.5 million eligible voters, about 2 million requested to vote online. Then, authorities pulled off a surprise: they introduced a “delayed decision” mechanism, allowing online voters to change their vote within 24 hours.

This particular aspect turned out to be the most dangerous. It is clear that the platform had been tested even before the voting process began. Government-controlled public organizations claimed that supposedly 10% of test participants used the re-voting function. They argued that it was introduced to counter voter pressure in the face of administrative influence, suggesting that voters could safely re-cast their votes in a different setting.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting: the results of the vote on the federal platform were published just an hour after the voting ended, while on the Moscow platform, they were released only 16 hours later. And then comes the most striking part—after this delay, the published online voting results radically (and I mean completely) overturned the final outcome of the elections in 8 out of 15 districts for the State Duma. In some of these districts, opposition candidates were leading in the in-person polling stations, but after e-voting, everything inexplicably shifted in the opposite direction, with pro-government candidates emerging victorious. Voter turnout in Moscow’s electronic voting system reached an astonishing 95.4%.

“It’s Not About How They Vote—It’s About How They Count!”

The devil is in the details. Authorities claimed that Russia’s internet voting system was based on blockchain technology. However, in a properly implemented blockchain system, data replication across multiple independent servers is a built-in safeguard to prevent unauthorized changes. If someone tries to tamper with the data, other nodes in the network would detect it and reject the altered transactions and blocks.

But that wasn’t the case here. Instead, all voting data was stored on a single server—within the Moscow Information Department. This meant authorities had no technical obstacles to modifying the final results as many times as they wanted.

How exactly was the manipulation carried out? Experts believe the organizers of the voting system had access to a “master key”, which allowed them to rewrite the data.

Unlike reading data, modifying blockchain records requires the update to be replicated across all network nodes. This process typically takes hours, as each update must be transmitted, verified, and confirmed. However, any observers monitoring the blockchain in real time could have noticed and raised the alarm.

Conveniently, at exactly 8:00 PM, when the voting ended, election observers suddenly lost access to the voting data. The FSB officers responsible for granting observer access to the system were supposed to issue a new security certificate to allow continued monitoring—but they never did. Instead, they blamed a mysterious “technical failure.”

The official explanations for the delay in decrypting online voting data and generating the final protocol were almost comical. Election officials and information center representatives gave conflicting and implausible excuses, including:

• The system needed time to “assemble the key” and “verify voter lists.”
• The “speed of development” was an issue.
• They had to recount votes for those who used the “revote” feature.

This last claim was particularly absurd—especially considering that, during the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections, online voting results were published almost immediately.

In the end, authorities blamed everything on the “delayed voting” mechanism, claiming that it forced them to recount 300,000 votes multiple times.

To any rational observer, this was a blatant attempt to feed nonsense to the public. Yet, the Russian electorate swallowed it whole.

But mathematics doesn’t lie.

After the election, opposition analysts obtained the raw, encrypted database of online voting results. This dataset included timestamps and votes cast for each candidate. By grouping the data into time intervals, analysts uncovered a suspicious trend:

• Near the end of Sunday, the number of votes for pro-government candidates began to rise at an unnatural rate.
• The level of support for other candidates remained unchanged.
• For most of the voting period, voting patterns were consistent, displaying stable correlations between candidates.
• But on the last day, a sudden and dramatic surge in votes for pro-government candidates was visible in the database.

Most revealingly, these vote surges happened at the exact same time across multiple districts. This suggests a coordinated and centrally controlled injection of fake votes—an engineered manipulation of the election outcome.

To prevent backlash, the Russian authorities staged a preemptive media operation. They created a public election monitoring headquarters in Moscow, designed to drown out any criticism.

This “public watchdog” began bombarding the media with statements praising the success of remote voting, dismissing any accusations of fraud or serious violations. The goal was clear: control the narrative and prevent mass protests before they could even start.

You might think: “Well, what else do you expect? This is Russia.”

And yes, in a country with a weak civil society and an authoritarian political system, election fraud is par for the course. But the real danger lies in the fact that Ukraine—with its still-fragile democratic traditions and lack of oversight mechanisms for internet voting—could be tempted to follow Russia’s lead.

Without proper safeguards, Ukraine’s own version of electronic voting could become an even worse instrument for election fraud than what we saw in Russia.