Russian officials entered public-sector employees’ data into an electronic database without their consent to monitor voter turnout, legal aid project says

During recent elections to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, officials stepped up monitoring of public-sector employees’ turnout at polling stations, the legal aid project Na Ravnykh reported.

The methods and extent of monitoring varied from region to region. In Khabarovsk, school employees were required to vote for incumbent Mayor Sergei Kravchuk or United Russia State Duma deputy Maxim Ivanov and to send the school principal a photo of their completed ballot, said Vyacheslav Pilnikov, regional coordinator of the Uchitel teachers’ union, in comments to Na Ravnykh.

According to Pilnikov, officials created an electronic database called “We Are Together” to track turnout, and school administrations entered employees’ phone numbers into it without their consent. After voting, each employee had to call a designated number, and the system recorded calls from numbers entered into the database.

At a meeting held by the Khabarovsk city administration’s education department, officials told school principals that these instructions were deliberately given verbally so that, if complaints arose, they could be called “recommendations.”

In Moscow, an employee at one institution was warned she would be reminded to vote for three days because “it’s obvious who has voted.” Another Moscow employee told the project that management “sees from the lists” who refused to vote.

In the Tula region, where remote electronic voting was not used, officials monitored turnout through a “quiz” for which employees were asked to scan a code at the polling station to take part.