Preparation: cutting off access to video surveillance

Video surveillance has been with us since 2012, when Putin introduced it across the country and the country saw the stuffing. Now it is worse.

Already at meeting No. 3 in the spring, Ella Alexandrovna read out a speech about video surveillance, and it was clear we would not see it again.

Candidates without video#

Three days before voting, at meeting No. 51, members of the Central Election Commission stripped candidates of access to the special video-surveillance portal. I analysed her speech and found that candidates lost video access because of "unsecured communication channels", meaning login from personal devices through Gosuslugi. The CEC considers candidates' access dangerous. And yet 4 million voters vote through remote electronic voting over those same "unsecured channels".

In a situation this unprecedented it is actually a miracle that we still saw video of ballot stuffing. Of course there was more than two clips. Under secrecy, and with no access, only two were noticed by chance.

Even the people responsible for video surveillance lost access#

On the day of "functional testing" there was simply a page with no access to video.

And at 23:00 the same day, a ban. Logging in produced an error.

So the person responsible for video had the video taken away. A call to support did not help. The chair simply removed her access.

Video cannot be requested even when there was a violation#

The CEC changed the resolution on video surveillance. Compared with 2021, a new condition appeared for making a request. Paragraph 6.5 of the annex to CEC Resolution No. 3/29-9 of 15 April 2026 says an observer may receive video only if they were present at the count:

in the premises where they were present, respectively, when the voting results were established

In practice, if a party appoints 9 observers, the right to request video belongs not to the person whose rights were violated or who noticed a violation, but only to the person present at the count. The CEC will probably end up there: filming only the count, and allowing complaints only about the count. Stuffing will be legalised by a video of the count.