MOSCOW, December 31, 6:35 /ITAR-TASS/. Chairman of the Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) Vladimir Churov on Tuesday morning will hold an operational briefing with colleagues in all 83 regions of the Russian Federation. The communication will be held in the form of a videoconference and will be a stage in the demonstration of new information possibilities of the CEC.
Taking into account the New Year holidays, New Year’s tree will be installed in the hall. Its design also corresponds to the topic of the meeting. Instead of balls and crackers, the tree will be decorated with outdated items that were decommissioned during the reorganisation. Strictly speaking, the reconstruction had begun in late 2011. And exactly one year ago, the presentation of the first results took place at the CEC. So, technological ‘New Year parties’ have become a tradition at the CEC building in Bolshoi Cherkassky Pereulok Street.
A year ago, a huge screen consisting of 21 video panels was installed in the CEC conference hall, and five smaller screens, which allowed people to monitor the voting procedure and vote counting both at the local and regional and federal level, were also put there. The first test for the new information centre was the single voting day on September 8, 2013. The work to install at the CEC state-of-the-art information technology equipment continued simultaneously. It is understood that the latest innovations will be widely used in the information centre in the forthcoming single voting day - September 14, 2014. Churov has already called this day the main event of the coming year. According to the head of the CEC, September 14 in terms of the number of elections might outstrip the 2013 single voting day.
It is easy to assume that those invited will not be very enthusiastic about the time of the presentation. Last year, a similar “matinee” failed to attract many people. Nevertheless, journalists that give coverage of the work of the CEC, have become accustomed to the exotic time of the events. So, at midnight on the eve of presidential elections on December 4, 2012, journalists were invited to the presentation of a video wall, which received images from webcams installed at polling stations. And the summarisation of the official results of the presidential election ended at about 23:00, Moscow time on March 7. But the most extraordinary thing was the invitation of guests to the opening of an exhibition of war artists, dedicated to the anniversary of the Great Patriotic War (of Soviet Union against Nazi Germany of 1941-1945). The time of the event sounded like it was sung in the famous song, “on June 22 exactly at four o’clock a.m.