Available in Russian
Author: Elena Gritsenko
DOI: 10.21128/1812-7126-2025-2-77-102
Keywords: active voting rights; guarantees of electoral rights in the digital environment; electronic voting; remote electronic voting; digital voter; judicial protection of digital electoral rights
Experience of various constitutional democracies that have implemented electronic voting in elections and referendums demonstrates the significant difficulty of eliminating systemic shortcomings in this form of voting, especially those relating to equal suffrage, ballot secrecy, and the transparency and openness of elections. In recent years, the Russian Federation has actively piloted diverse models of electronic voting, both in-person and remote via the Internet, utilising federal and regional state information systems. The procedural variations in electronic voting across different constituent entities of the Federation, as permitted by the Central Election Commission and regional electoral bodies through delegated regulatory authority, have exacerbated concerns over the equality of electoral rights. Moreover, the assignment of quasi-legislative functions to election commissions, specifically in regulating digital electoral procedures, undermines the consistency and coherence needed to ensure robust legal guarantees in this domain. The case of Moscow, where electronic voting has been elevated from a supplementary to a primary method of casting ballots, along with the regulation of eligibility criteria for digital voters and procedures for opting out of electronic voting, merits critical analysis. Public oversight of electronic voting remains particularly challenging, further complicated by the lack of transparency and accessibility in reporting results. This is evidenced by final protocols that fail to adequately reflect the specificities of digital participation. Additionally, the right to legal protection of electoral rights in the digital sphere is hindered by the judiciary’s restrictive interpretation of the scope of review in such cases. Given the persistent underdevelopment of legal safeguards for the active voting rights in electronic voting, the wholesale transition to this form of voting as the primary mechanism for expressing the electorate’s will cannot, at this stage, be deemed consistent with the constitutional principles of electoral law.
About the author: Elena Gritsenko – Doctor of Sciences in Law, Professor, Department of Constitutional Law, State University of Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Citation:
Gritsenko E. (2025) Obespechenie i zashchita aktivnogo izbiratel'nogo prava v protsedurakh elektronnogo golosovaniya [Ensuring and protecting the active voting rights in electronic voting procedures]. Sravnitel'noe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie, vol.34, no.2, pp.77–102. (In Russian).
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