$58M Voting Machine

With parliamentary elections around the corner, the Central Elections Commission is preparing to use a new $58 million computerized voting system on the national level for the first time.

GAS-Vybory, the elections commission's system in Moscow, will manage 95,000 polling stations around the country, using hundreds of thousands of kilometers of cable and three satellites to relay voting results.

Elections chief Alexander Veshnyakov says the system is tamper-proof and will increase voter confidence in election results.

But because the system is so much more centralized than its U.S. and European counterparts, some observers fear that too much power is being placed in too few hands.

The actual computing center in the commission's sprawling glass and marble headquarters near Lubyanskaya Ploshchad consists of about 20 PC stations and several large monitors that show detailed graphics during the course of elections. These are broadcast to television stations and the commission's own viewers' hall in the same building, where journalists monitor the results.

In another part of the building, hidden away in a far corner, is a room where GAS-Vybory's mainframe is kept. No bigger than 6 square meters, the climate-controlled room is the nerve center for elections all over the country. Its servers store 1.2 terabytes of information, or the equivalent of more than a million computer disks. Developed in 1995, it has been used for more than 5,000 elections around the country.

Since 2000, the Central Elections Commission has been working on upgrading the system to make the country's voting system more automated. It tested the new version of GAS-Vybory for the first time in September for the Leningrad region gubernatorial vote.

GAS-Vybory will be used on a national level for the first time in December and get a second national inauguration a few months later during the March presidential election.

Holding a national election is not cheap. This year's budget was set at 3.5 billion rubles ($120 million) -- much of which has been spent on improving GAS-Vybory, election officials say.

Besides containing data on candidates and elections commission employees, GAS-Vybory keeps detailed information on the country's 110 million eligible voters, and is perhaps the most accurate database on some two-thirds of the population.

Voters from the United States and Britain are likely to be surprised that in Russia a single organization -- the Central Elections Commission -- is responsible for both counting votes and organizing elections.

In the United States, results in congressional and presidential elections are consolidated by each state and the media are left to interpret the nationwide outcome, according to Penelope Bonsfall, director of the U.S. Office of Election Administration.

A similar process takes place in Britain. "It's up to the media to piece the picture together," said Stephen Judson, policy review manager for Britain's electoral commission. "There is no centralized computer system, and the commission has no role in counting votes. It is very highly decentralized."

During an election for the House of Commons, each of Britain's 659 constituencies produces its own results and the newspapers compile that information.

Not so in Russia, where each polling station reports to its regional elections committee and each regional elections committee feeds its data to the Central Elections Commission in Moscow, which then interprets nationwide results.

In an innovation for the upcoming Duma elections, preliminary results from each region will be posted on each regional elections committee's web site. GAS-Vybory's designers at the Voskhod research institute in Moscow were quick to reassure that this will not make it possible for hackers to tamper with the system. "GAS-Vybory is an independent system, and its main servers are not connected to the Internet," Voskhod director Alexander Kalinin said.

Another difference between the Russian and Western systems is where votes are counted. In Britain, ballots are put in bags and counted at the constituency level. In Russia, each polling station is responsible for counting its own ballots -- and this opens the door to possible fraud, analysts said.

An in-depth investigation of the 2000 presidential election by The Moscow Times, for example, found that ballots were physically stuffed at polling stations, as in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, and virtually stuffed higher up at the regional level, as in Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria and Saratov. There were in some instances large discrepancies between polling station results and those reported by regional elections committees.

"To say that the [GAS-Vybory] system itself is very susceptible to tampering would be untrue," said Mark Urnov, a political analyst at the Ekspertiza think tank. "There may be minimal errors when the results are calculated, but that is not where the greatest threat lies."

He predicted that traditional methods of ballot-counting fraud, mainly filling in ballots for absentee voters, will remain the preferred way to doctor some voting data in the Duma vote. "I doubt there will be a high-tech revolution in election fraud. Traditional time-tested methods will continue to be used," he said.

Robert Barry, deputy head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's mission in Russia, declined to comment on the reliability of GAS-Vybory, saying he was not familiar with the system. OSCE will be monitoring the parliamentary elections, with 438 observers working throughout the country.

But some politicians who have seen GAS-Vybory in action insist it is susceptible to tampering. The Communist Party has repeatedly complained of fraud in elections.

Vadim Solovyov, head of the party's legal department, said GAS-Vybory was turned off for a few hours while votes were being counted during the Tver gubernatorial elections in 2000. When it was switched back on, he said, the Communist candidate had lost his lead to the incumbent.

"What happened during that time?" Solovyov said. "Ballots were rewritten and entered into the system over and over until they finally depicted a win for the incumbent. We were able to prove this had happened because we had one of the system's designers analyze how data were entered. He proved that they were entered more than once.

"But what is worrisome now is that the new version of the system will not show records of data being changed."

Solovyov also expressed concern that the so-called siloviki -- the powerful clan of former KGB and military men in the Kremlin -- will have too much influence over the Duma results.

"Do you know what kind of people are being appointed to head regional elections committees?" he said. "As a rule, one in three appointees has a military or security background."

Solovyov's estimate could be close to reality, considering that Voskhod director Kalinin is a former KGB official who worked at FAPSI for 15 years. Worries about who was overseeing elections were raised in March when FAPSI -- the Federal Agency for Governmental Communications and Information, which oversaw GAS-Vybory -- was disbanded and its activities split between the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and the Defense Ministry.

Kalinin said the FSB could not wield any influence over the system. "Only the elections commission has access to the information on GAS-Vybory," he said.