Moscow’s electronic voting system reportedly checks users for active VPNs. The check doesn’t block voting, and the site’s code doesn’t reveal why the data is collected.
Moscow’s online voting system checks whether a voter is using a VPN, according to programmer Pyotr Zhizhin, who analyzed and documented in detail the scheme used to falsify electronic voting in the 2021 State Duma elections.
Zhizhin said the check in the current vote works like this:
Before login, the voting site elec.mos.ru has the voter’s browser load an image from YouTube, which is blocked in Russia. If the image loads, the voter has a working VPN. The browser sends the result to the voting server. A second later, the voter logs in through mos.ru under their own name.
The result of the check does not prevent anyone from voting, Zhizhin said.
“For every voter, the voting operator gets an answer to the question, ‘Is this person using a VPN?’ and at the same moment learns the voter’s identity. Nothing has to be hacked to do it: the two requests appear side by side in the same log. The site’s code doesn’t show what the report is for or how long it is kept,” Zhizhin said.
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