MINSK, 12 June (BelTA) – Chairman of the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Belarus Igor Karpenko talked about the digitization of the election process on the air of the TV channel Belarus One, BelTA has learned.
The CEC has worked out a concept for digitizing the election process. Igor Karpenko said: “We have attentively studied all the existing approaches to these matters in neighboring countries. We’ve participated in a number of conferences. We are interested in the experience of Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan in a number of fields. By the way, we used some digitization components on the single voting day. For instance, we compiled voter lists using data from the country’s population registry. In other words, we are starting to create a registry of voters according to the concept. Apart from that, we create a system to allow voters to find the necessary polling station depending on the address they enter.”
In his words, the concept for digitizing the election process has ambitious goals.
“The concept provides for creating an information system that covers all the stages of the election process. For instance, the creation of the single registry of voters. Entities that will participate in creating this registry will be chosen. Once again we are not reinventing the wheel. We have attentively studied the experience of neighbors. We see how these things are organized over there,” the CEC head said. “We may have to create a personal area for voters on the website. We may introduce digital voting for some categories of citizens. By the way, some naively believe that the option is primarily intended for citizens, who are on business trips abroad. It is not. For instance, Russia disables digital voting from abroad because as a rule, the option is used to attack the single voting system, which is provided to citizens of the Russian Federation.”
“Today we gave a preliminary report to the president that the concept had been worked out. The concept needs to be discussed now. After that we are ready to sketch out a plan of concrete actions stage by stage within a certain timeframe. We should primarily rely on domestic software, on our technical capabilities. And some government body may have to take care of maintaining this system and overseeing the digitization process. These are prospective plans for the future,” Igor Karpenko said.
