Chronicle of Current Vote Rigging

A Chronicle of Current Vote Rigging: The Russian National Referendum Through the Eyes of Observers of Petersburg
July 16, 2020

This film by Observers of Petersburg shows how such how a high turnout (74.7%) and outcome (77.7% “yes” votes) were attained in Petersburg during the 2020 Russian national referendum.

Spoiler alert! All this was made possible by six days of early voting, which were impossible to monitor.

Time codes:
00:00 Opening
00:59 How will the 2020 vote be remembered?
02:44 Coronavirus: voting in a pandemic
06:12 Early voting
09:28 Voting at workplaces
13:20 Voting rolls
17:49 David Frenkel’s story: how a journalist’s arm was broken at a polling station
21:35 Observers from the Public Chamber
26:09 Vote counting
31:42 Honest polling station commissions
35:24 What will happen next? The Russian national referendum’s impact on future elections

Featuring:
Anastasia Romanova
Maria Moldavskaya
Dmitry Neuymin
Konstantin Korolyov
Olga Dmitrieva
Galina Kultiasova
Mikhail Molochnikov
Polina Kostyleva
Olga Khmelevskaya
Maria Chebykina
Natalia Yegorushkina
David Frenkel
Ivan Kvasov

The film was produced by Yulia and Yevgeny Selikhov.
Thanks to iz0 for doing the animation.

Sign a petition against multi-day voting.

Thanks to Leokadia Frenkel for the link. The video’s title is an allusion to the Soviet-era samizdat periodical Chronicle of Current Events. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader

УИК 40 СПб Counting the votes at Polling Station No. 40 in Petersburg. Photo courtesy of Deutsche Welle

Leviathan

DSCN4214 “Precinct Election Commission for Polling Station No. 2218.” This is the innocent-looking sign the leviathan that has strangled democracy, including free elections, in Russia puts out to signal its presence. It achieves victory over earnest voters and honest election observers, some of whom valiantly serve on such commissions, by killing them with a hundred thousand cuts. Writ large, the flagrant tricks and shady practices used by neighborhood and local election officials add up to national elections that are rigged from top to bottom. Although this trickery has been well documented by independent observers, Russian reporters, and researchers, the sheer weight of it somehow has never made an impression on western journalists, who continue to write as if Putin’s popularity were a scientifically proven fact instead of carefully crafted mixture of massive coercion and hoodwinking. Photo by the Russian Reader

Central Election Commission Does Not Accredit 4,500 Presidential Election Observers Affiliated with Navalny
Mediazona
March 7, 2018

The Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) has refused to accredit 4,500 presidential election observers affiliated with the news website Leviathan, created by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. Navalny has written about the incident on his Telegram channel.

“We were suddenly told today that [Leviathan] had been shut down by the court, and the CEC would not accredit it. Earlier we have received accreditation for 4,500 observers affiliated with Leviathan. Now they are left without accreditation. Even [Vladimir] Churov [the previous CEC chair, replaced in 2016 by Ella Pamfilova] didn’t do such things,” wrote Navalny.

In addition, the CEC has refused accrediate observers affiliated with the online publication Molniya (“Lightning”), which sponsors election observers from the Golos Movement for the Defense of Voters’ Rights.

Golos co-chair Grigory Melkonyants confirmed to Mediazona there were problems with accrediting election observers registered by Molniya. He said that 850 people who had signed contracts with Molniya in October 2017 were at issue.

Molniya submitted accreditation applications to the CEC two weeks ago. The CEC informed them that it had sent them a written reply by post. Melkonyants said that in the the past the CEC would always simply invite Golos to come to its offices and pick up the accreditation papers. Now, on the contrary, the commission’s decision is unknown: they would have to wait for the letter to arrive. Melkonyants believes this testifies to the likelihood the Molniya observers will have their accreditation requests rejected.

However, he noted it was still possible to register as an observer affiliated with a particular candidate, and Golos was now working on this.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade GMV for the heads-up

“We Have a Surrogate Democracy”: An Interview with Ekaterina Schulman

Ekaterina Schulman. Photo courtesy of Andrei Stekachov and *The Village*

Political Scientist Ekaterina Schulman on Why You Should Vote
Anya Chesova and Natasha Fedorenko
The Village
September 16, 2016

This Sunday, September 18, the country will vote for a new State Duma, the seventh since the fall of the Soviet Union. The peculiarity of this vote is that it will take place under a mixed electoral system for the first time since 2003. 225 MPs will be elected to five-year tears from party lists, while the other 225 MPs will be elected from single-mandate districts. Several days before the elections, The Village met with Ekaterina Schulman, a political scientist and senior lecturer at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). We talked with her about why you should vote if United Russia is going to win in any case, as well as about the changes in store for the Russian political system in the coming years.

The Upcoming Elections

The Village: On Sunday, the country will hold the first elections to the State Duma since 2011. The social climate in the city and the country as a whole has changed completely since that time. Protests erupted in 2011, and the people who protested on Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Avenue believed they could impact the political situation. Nowadays, few people have held on to such hopes. What should we expect from the upcoming elections? And why should we bother with them?

Ekaterina Schulman: Everything happening now with the State Duma election is a consequence of the 2011–2012 protests, including changes in the laws, the introduction of the mixed system, the return of single-mandate MPs, the lowering of the threshold for parties to be seated in the Duma from seven to five percent, and the increased number of parties on the ballot. These are the political reforms outlined by then-president Dmitry Medvedev as a response to the events of December 2011. Later, we got a new head of state, but it was already impossible to take back these promises. The entire political reality we observe now has grown to one degree or another out of the 2011–2012 protest campaign, whether as rejection, reaction or consequence. It is the most important thing to happen in the Russian political arena in recent years.

The statements made by Vyacheslav Volodin, the president’s deputy chief of staff, on the need to hold honest elections, Vladimir Churov’s replacement by Ella Pamfilova as head of the Central Electoral Commission, the departure of someone more important than Churov from the CEC, deputy chair Leonid Ivlev, and the vigorous sacking of chairs of regional electoral commissions are all consequences of the protests. If they had not taken place, nothing would have changed. We would still have the same proportional voting system, the same seven-percent threshold, the same old Churov or Churov 2.0. Continue reading ““We Have a Surrogate Democracy”: An Interview with Ekaterina Schulman” →

Watching the Watchers

Sveta Erpyleva after finishing her 24-hour shift as elections observer in the wee hours of Monday morning. Photo courtesy of the author — Sveta Erpyleva after finishing her 24-hour shift as an elections observer in the wee hours of Monday morning. Photo courtesy of the author

Sveta Erpyleva
Watching the Watchers
September 20, 2016

I want to articulate a few ideas about the practice of working as an elections observer from a slightly different perspective than people usually write about it. In my view, there are two things that make the practice attractive to many of us.

The first thing is the indescribable feeling of belonging to an anonymous community, a team of strangers involved in an important cause. Such communities are nearly absent in our everyday lives. We have friends and families, but that is not the same thing, of course. We have colleagues and people who share our interests. We might not know them personally, either, but we never come together with them to touch on something that affects the entire country. In this case, however, over the course of twenty-four hours we experience the same events and emotions as hundreds of other observers in different parts of the country. We share our impressions with each other in comments sections on social networks, we all stay awake for days on end, and together we quarrel with members of electoral commissions. It is a very unusual and powerful sensation. I think many people have experienced it, whether they were aware of it or not.

The second thing is the chance to feel we are not couch potato dissidents or whatever it is called, but real citizens, conscientious citizens. We voluntarily get up early in the morning, we wrestle with a large group of people on our lonesome, and we struggle mightily with fatigue. And then, naturally, we write about it, hearing in reply all sorts of compliments from loved ones and acquaintances. But that is what we expected to hear, isn’t it?

In connection with these two things, I think it is important we be aware of the following. An anonymous political community is groovy, but sometimes it is not worth getting carried away with it. Are we certain we want the exact same things as the conscientious, get-up-and-go people who seem so much like us on elections day?

I chatted with a pleasant, conscientious young man who, like me, had come of his own free will to work as an observer at my polling station. Nope, his way was not my way, I discovered. We wanted different things.

As for the second thing, it is quite simple to selflessly surrender twenty-four hours of your life to “civil society” once every two or three years and then hear lots of nice things about yourself. Meanwhile, there are people in our midst who selflessly give up several hours every day to political struggles and social activism. Ninety-five percent of that time vanishes into the mist, because that is the nature of modern politics. These people do not get any doughnuts in the guise of society’s approval for ninety-five percent of their work. I admire people like this if their views are congenial to mine rather than people who have worked as election observers. Sorry.

I am not saying you should not go work as an elections observer. I did it myself, and I imagine I will go and do it the next time round. What I mean to say is that, first and foremost, we should not look at ourselves through rose-colored glasses.

Sveta Erpyleva is a sociologist who works at the PS Lab (Public Sociology Laboratory) in Petersburg. This past Sunday, she volunteered as an elections observer at a polling station in the city’s Central District. My thanks to her for allowing me to translate and publish her remarks here.