‘Electronic voting must die’: Election expert Sergey Shpilkin explains how Russian officials thwart independent analysis

When releasing this week's voting results, Russia's Central Election Commission deliberately withheld statistical information from independent analysts, encoding the data published on its website to prevent researchers from downloading it automatically. The voting figures now available through the commission are "encrypted," meaning that any numbers copied from the website will appear as alphabetic code and randomized characters when pasted into external documents or spreadsheets. Statistician Sergey Shpilkin was one of the first analysts to draw attention to the election commission's "encoded" numbers. A graduate of Moscow State University's physics department and an elections analyst, Shpilkin has spent years downloading and studying data from the Central Election Commission in search of anomalies in Russia's turnout and voting results. Many political scientists and ordinary voters turn to his post-election graphs for objective assessments of falsifications in Russia. Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova spoke to Shpilkin to understand the arms race now underway between independent experts and Russia's election officials. Original Article: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/09/20/electronic-voting-must-die