Golos insists on free access to polling station video recordings

In response to the request from the Central Election Commission of Russia, the Council of the Golos movement prepared suggestions to amend the Commission’s plans for the use of video monitoring and broadcasting devices and the storage of video recordings made during 2018 presidential elections.

SUGGESTIONS 

to the proposed Application procedure for video monitoring and broadcasting devices in the polling stations and territorial election commission rooms, broadcasting of video online and the storage of relevant video recordings made during the presidential elections

Golos movement for protection of voters’ rights believes that the current Russian context makes the use of video cameras in polling station and territorial election commission rooms exceptionally expedient. The video monitoring experience gained in 2012-2016 has demonstrated its effectiveness despite the gradual reduction in the extent of video monitoring and the tightening of rules for its application. The current proposal envisions the making of another important innovative step, which expands video monitoring capabilities — installation of video cameras in territorial election commission rooms.

Organization of election video monitoring seeks to realize the principles of openness and transparency in the actions of election commissions, to increase the citizens’ trust in election results, and to improve the very process of elections in our country. The public access to online broadcasts of video camera recordings, envisioned by the proposal, is in line with these objectives. 

Nevertheless, the proposal has several serious shortcomings concerning access to video recordings. In this part, the proposal is a step back in comparison with the procedure of video monitoring that was approved by the Central Election Commission of Russia in 2012.

First, we would like to note the restriction on scope of persons with access to the video recordings. The proposal envisions that access to all video recordings is given only to the parties that nominated the registered presidential candidate and to the registered candidate himself. This provision implies that everyone else — regular voters, all other parties, public associations that protect citizens’ voting rights, journalists and law enforcement agencies — is less concerned with trustworthy election results. 

Restrictions that give voters the right to receive a video recording from no more than one polling station are illogical and unlawful, since results of elections aren’t determined in a single polling station, but in a voting district as a whole. 

This approach seems especially inconsistent considering that real-time video broadcasts from any polling stataion can be seen by any voter on the election day (which we consider the right thing to do), while after the election day the voter’s right to receive a video recording is restricted by one polling station.

It is proposed that access to video recordings will be provided after submitting a request to the election commission of the Russian Federation entity, and the request should specify violation “that was committed in applicant’s opinion” and the period of time when it was committed. Experience demonstrates that such wording allows election commissions to arbitrarily refuse the provision of video recordings. This being said, election commissions do not store the video recordings themselves and after evaluating “compliance with the requirements” of the request, redirect it to the agent tasked with storing the video recordings.

It’s also important to keep in mind that under the current methodology for detection of electoral offenses, it’s impossible to state the “specific time when the required event [events stated as violation] began and ended.” To detect fraud with voter turnout, one needs the video recording of the whole day of voting at the polling station (Tatarstan, Korolev). To detect carousel voting one needs the full video recordings of the whole election day across the large number of nearby polling stations (St. Petersburg, Samara, Ruza).

And finally, a serious restriction on video monitoring capabilities is the abbreviated three-month period of video recording storage. Although the proposal presents the three-month period as the shortest possible, in practice it means that the “technical operator” that will store the video recording will definitely use it for guidance. It should be noted that this term is determined by contract between the federal authority that commissions organization of video monitoring and the “technical operator,” while the election commissions are in no way a part of this agreement. The precedent for destroying video recordings on the basis of such contract was already established in the Chelyabinsk Region in 2016.

It should be noted that justifying the short period of storage by the costliness of video recording storage doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, as there are currently plenty of publicly accessible inexpensive servers for storage of unlimited volumes of data. Justification of this short period by the three-month time limitation on actionable administrative claims also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, since there is a 12-month statute of limitations on lodging complaints regarding administrative violations.

The Council of the Golos movement believes that there are no reasons to restrict access to video recordings made in the process of video monitoring except for desire to limit the citizens’ ability to receive information on the activities of election commissions. This goes against the goals of video monitoring declared in the proposed Procedure and violates one of the overall principles of Russian elections. The video monitoring’s potential will not be used to its fullest, and significant budget assets (that belong to all people), that will be spent on organization of video monitoring, will be wasted if the aforementioned Procedure is approved as is.

The Council of the Golos movement’s suggestions:

1. Give Russian voters free and direct access to video recordings made at any polling station, bypassing the intercession of election commissions. 

This could be done, for example, by expanding the “broadcasting portal” with a section for working with video recordings for the duration of their storage, in a similar vein to the functionality of the “service portal” that will be created for the Central Election Commission and regional electon commissions in accordance with the proposed Procedure (item 1.13). 

The Procedure mentions that the citizens will be provided with access to video recordings “by way of sending them a link from the service portal” (items 5.8, 5.7 (2)). We suggest that this mechanism is expanded through open publication of links to all recordings, similar to the “real-time video monitoring,” envisioned by the Procedure (item 1.13). Such approach will decrease the work load on regional election commissions that will no longer have to review applications and generate requests for the technical operator, and on the technical operators themselves who won’t have to generate the links and send them to users.

2. Increase the minimum period of video recording storage from three months to one year.

Members of the Council of the Golos movement for protection of voters’ rights

Vitaly Averin

Stanislav Andreichuk

Andrei Buzin

Yuri Gurman

Vitaly Kovin

Arkady Lyubarev

Grigory Melkonyants

Alexei Petrov

Roman Udot