Before the 2026 State Duma elections, remote electronic voting may be expanded to nearly half of Russia’s 89 regions. In March 2026, Vedomosti, citing sources close to the presidential administration, wrote that the system had already been tested in 41 regions. During the 2024 presidential election, REV was used in 28 regions, with about five million people voting through it.
The system allows voters to cast ballots online after logging into Gosuslugi from a phone or computer, while the data is sent to a single server and stored using blockchain technology. Sources interviewed by Novaya Gazeta Europe acknowledge that REV is convenient for voters, but stress that it is extremely difficult to verify whether ballots are counted correctly and whether interference has occurred.
A political consultant who has worked on campaigns at different levels told the outlet that the expansion of REV effectively removes any doubt that election results in those regions may be heavily manipulated.
Yevgeny Fedin, a programmer and member of the observer movement Sonar, says interference is possible both on a voter’s device and at the server level. He said that back in 2019 he found a fragment in the source code of the first REV version that could allow a vote to be changed. Among the possible scenarios he described are the use of “loaded” computers and browser extensions that alter a ballot before it is written to the blockchain. Fedin also links three-day voting to the convenience of mobilizing employees of dependent enterprises into controlled online voting.
A source familiar with the organization of REV told the newspaper that the core issue is not the technology itself but pressure on voters. At the same time, Fedin says the developers of neither the Moscow system, created by the city’s information technology department, nor the federal platform run by Rostelecom have provided proof that the vote is truly anonymous. He also considers server-side manipulation possible, including situations in which certain ballots never reach the blockchain.
An engineer involved in developing election equipment told Novaya Gazeta Europe that neither system is open to meaningful civic oversight and that both should be banned. At the same time, a source close to the organization of REV said observers can access voting transaction data, but analyzing it requires specialized expertise, and there is still no mass movement of technical observers.
One of the main questions is why REV has still not been introduced nationwide. In particular, it is not used in St. Petersburg or the Leningrad region. According to the outlet’s sources, this may be due to political decisions and the unwillingness of regional authorities to attract extra attention and risk scandals. A Vedomosti source also said the presidential administration wants to avoid excessively high online turnout and keep it below 10% of all voters in a region.