Russia’s Election Commission modifies website to disable automatic downloads of plebiscite results

The website where Russia’s Central Election Commission publishes official data on elections and referendums, vybory.izbircom.ru, has disabled automatic downloads of the constitutional plebiscite results. The site now includes a captcha test, to determine whether or not the user is a human, reports Grigory Melkonyants, the co-chair of the voter protection movement “Golos.”

In particular, a captcha needs to be filled in to access the webpages of individual local electoral commissions. Information on voting progress in the constitutional plebiscite is also protected by a captcha. 

As Melkonyants explains, the introduction of captchas not only prevents this data from downloading automatically, but also requires users to visit the pages of each of Russia’s 93,000 polling stations manually and individually, in order to collect information on the vote.

Voting in Russia’s nationwide plebiscite on constitutional amendments ends July 1. 

According to the latest data from the Central Election Commission, turnout for the vote has surpassed 60 percent. Preliminary reports indicate that 72.92 percent of voters supported the changes to the constitution. 

On June 30, the Golos movement reported receiving 1,587 reports, including 682 complaints about voting violations. The authorities, on the other hand, maintain that electoral violations are isolated incidents.