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Moscow online voting officials have messed up their data yet again. This time, they couldn't do a basic math problem.

Source: Meduza

On September 8, Moscow held an experimental round of online voting as part of its citywide legislative elections. Almost 10,000 voters submitted their ballots online. Artyom Kostyrko, the deputy head of Moscow City Hall’s IT Department, organized the online voting process, and on September 18, he released new data about voter demographics in the new system’s first official run.

According to that data, 42 percent of Moscow’s online voters were men and 58 percent were women. The average age of male online voters was reportedly 35 years, and the average for women was 47. The average age overall, Kostyrko reported, was 37.4.

See the catch?

A bit of elementary math (35*0.42 + 47*0.58) reveals that if Kostyrko’s gender data is correct, the average age of Moscow’s online voters overall must by 41.96 years. That’s about four and a half years older than the figure Kostyrko reported. It’s also closer to the average age of voters who used paper ballots, which was reported as 46.8 years.

Veteran Russian journalist Alexey Venediktov, who also led the citizens’ board responsible for Moscow’s online voting, promised shortly before this year’s election to report the average age of the city’s Internet voters himself. On September 12, he announced that the figure he had reached was 32. That’s more than five years less than Kostyrko’s average and a full decade less than ours.