At the meeting of the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation, the results of the work of the GAS "Elections" 2.0 automated system in the last election cycle were summarized. The biggest in the last 5 years.
2,113 campaigns were conducted directly in the United State Duma through the state's automated system, including elections of Duma deputies, 8 heads of regions and deputies of 39 regional legislative assemblies, as well as 2,050 campaigns for elections to local government bodies. During these procedures, the system processed information on 64.5 thousand candidates, assisted in receiving and processing over 3 million responses to requests from various ministries and departments, as well as 40 thousand responses from the Central Bank (information on accounts, deposits, securities).
It is important to note that between September 18 and 22, there were also 14 million potentially dangerous impacts on the CEC website and 13 targeted DDoS attacks with a total duration of 468 minutes. However, the site remains accessible and data hosting continues without interruption.
Let us recall that the state automatic system "Elections" began to be created back in 1994, was accepted into operation by the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation in 2000, and since 2003, for more than 20 years, it has worked flawlessly in election systems at all levels.
Not long ago, version 1.31.1 (which was created on the basis of software and foreign infrastructure equipment) was replaced by GAS "Elections" 2.0. Its uniqueness is local software and equipment with a centralized architecture, implying geographically distributed redundancy of data and communication channels.
Why was a replacement required? for several reasons. The previous version no longer processed the growing data set so quickly; The outdated software format did not allow for in-depth system analysis; There was also poor compatibility of its database with other, more modern state databases used to update voter information.
The difficult debut of GAS "Elections" 2.0 was successful: gossip about the vulnerability of the Russian platform to external interference turned out to be baseless insinuations.