On September 17, the first-ever Duma elections in a three-day format kicked off in Russia. In total, during the multi-day voting at the level of all elections, more than 31 thousand mandates are distributed, including the posts of governors in nine regions. To prepare for these elections, the Russian authorities had to recall technologies from the 90s (adding duplicates of candidates to the ballot), as well as adopt a law that deprived thousands of Russians of passive suffrage, just as it was in the USSR before 1936. The first day of voting was remembered for long queues, stuffing and roundabouts. The correspondent of «Novaya» tells about its results.
The CEC decided to vote in the parliamentary elections for three days back in mid-June. The format was officially conditioned by the COVID-19 pandemic — multi-day elections were supposed to help avoid large crowds. As Ella Pamfilova noted then, «the first priority is the health of our citizens.»
Despite this, September 17 began with long queues in front of polling stations. For example, in Moscow, in front of the precinct in Bolshoy Afanasyevsky Lane, more than a hundred people were waiting for their turn to vote. Approximately the same number of people stood in Krasnoyarsk in front of one polling station, in connection with which the head of the electoral commission Alexei Podushkin even asked those present to disperse and come to vote on another day. Slightly fewer people came to the polls in the morning in Novosibirsk, Vladivostok and Omsk.
The Moscow City Election Commission explained the queues at some PECs (for example, at PEC No. 142 and PEC No. 9) by the fact that the military and employees of nearby organizations came to vote there. In addition, the commission noted that due to covid, not so many people can be at the PEC at the same time. In other cases, the IPCC pointed out that «high voter turnout at polling stations is not a violation.»
Social distance, however, was not always observed in the end. For example, at the site in the Vyborgsky district of St. Petersburg there were more than a hundred people at the same time. Ella Pamfilova, CEC Chairwoman, was outraged by the appearance of such situations.
Plot in the Vyborgsky district of St. Petersburg. Photo: observers of A Just Russia
“In the morning we saw that there were queues in some areas, the sanitary distance was not observed. It is unacceptable.
Colleagues, watch out, if queues form, take additional measures to maintain the distance, ”the official said last night.
The experts interviewed by Novaya Gazeta agree that it is primarily the mobilization of administrative resources that is to blame for the queues at the election commissions. According to political analyst Alexei Makarkin, the main factor that made this phenomenon visible to the naked eye is the day of the week. The three-day voting began on Friday, although earlier elections usually fell on a day off. Voters are not allowed to leave work for the whole day: “They ask for leave for an indefinite time, go to vote and return to work,” the expert explains. In addition, Makarkin adds that Friday's vote helped solve the problem of weak mobilization.
— When the elections fell on a day off, people left for their dachas and it was difficult to get them out of there. Now they are walking in slender rows and voting. There is nothing special about this, earlier the military used to vote like that. State employees used to vote mainly individually, but there were cases with queues too. Another thing is that all this very poorly corresponds to the antiquated goal, which was set for the three-day voting, explains political scientist Makarkin.
Large groups of employees from various companies were indeed seen in the elections. For example, in Yekaterinburg, more than 100 employees of the Sima-land company came to vote (known for obliging workers to sing the Russian anthem in chorus and participate in patriotic flash mobs), in Primorye, workers of the Zvezda shipbuilding complex voted, and in St. Petersburg it became known that it was on the 17th that Rospotrebnadzor employees were obliged to vote. On Friday morning, Yabloko even published a memo, which is supposedly distributed to civilian officials, telling how to correctly answer questions about the vote.
According to Roman Udot, co-chairman of the Golos public movement (recognized by the Ministry of Justice as a “foreign agent”), forcing civil servants to vote is one of the most common electoral fraud schemes.
— Huge queues indicate that people are being driven. At the same time, on a weekday, people are made clear that if they vote incorrectly, they will surely find out about it [at work]. This all goes on the level of rumors, in fact, we have not had any cases when someone was really caught by the hand for incorrect voting, says Udot.
Photo: Elena Lukyanova / «Novaya Gazeta»
The information is also confirmed by Meduza sources (we are forced to report that the publication is recognized as a «media-foreign agent»). As an interlocutor close to the presidential administration told the newspaper, «administratively dependent voters» were supposed to vote mostly before 12:00 on September 17. Mobilizing voters on the morning of the first election day gives the authorities time to get the votes of those “state employees” who did not come to vote on Friday, together with everyone else.
As a result, by 4 pm Moscow time, the turnout across Russia was 9.16%.
The maximum turnout was recorded in Chukotka — 31.39%. The second and third places were shared by the Chechen Republic (27.1%) and the Republic of Tuva (26.21%).
The minimum turnout was in St. Petersburg (3.72%), Sevastopol (0.76%) and Moscow (0.48%; by 8 am on September 18, the turnout in the capital, taking into account online voting, exceeded 23%). By eight o'clock in the evening, the indicator of the all-Russian turnout increased to 16.85%. However, these data did not take into account electronic voting. In turn, by four o'clock in the afternoon in various regions of the DEG used about 50% of those registered for remote voting. The DEG turnout on the first day was in the Kursk region — 55.46%, Murmansk — 59.27%, Nizhny Novgorod — 47.17%, Rostov — 57.12%, Yaroslavl — 63.05%, in Sevastopol — 46.63 %. In Moscow, by six o'clock in the evening of the first day, more than 1 million 30 thousand people voted electronically, that is, more than half of all who signed up.
Alexei Makarkin says that one should not be surprised at the figures of Chukotka, Chechnya and Tuva, as well as the separation of data in these regions from large cities: according to him, elections there will be quite predictable. “The experience of organized voting in these regions is quite high,” the political scientist explains. «In Moscow and St. Petersburg, it is more difficult to force even the same state employees to come and vote.»
Alexey Makarkin and the head of the Interregional Association of Voters, a member of the board of the Golos movement, Andrei Buzin, agree that even 9% for a three-day voting is quite a lot. According to the expert, this figure also confirms the use of administrative technologies to increase the turnout. At the same time, Roman Udot considers the indicator to be quite adequate.
— In fact, this is good, we feared that the turnout could turn out to be 40%. We usually estimate the administrative resource at 10-15%. In fact, they [the authorities] cannot especially cheat the voices of the people, because their resources here are extremely limited. So we can say that now they used the maximum level of administrative resources, explains Udot.
Home-based voting also shows interesting figures. For example, at polling station No. 2681 in the Moscow region town of Roshal, a third of voters — 652 out of 2028 people — registered to vote at home (as observer Tatyana Panyaeva told Novaya Gazeta, some voters at home in Roshal did not have an application acceptance date, there is no F.I. . O. of the PEC member and signatures of those who accepted the application). An abnormal number of applications for voting at home was also recorded in St. Petersburg: at polling station No. 134, 200 applications for voting at home have already been registered, and at PEC No. 177, more than 300 applications have been registered. In Chelyabinsk, almost every tenth voter turned out to be a “homeworker” (28,273 out of 227,596 voters voted outside the premises). At the same time, violations in the conduct of home-based voting were often recorded in the city, which ultimately led to a scandal with a brawl between a representative of Yabloko and the titushki, calling the police and canceling 1,140 ballots from 600 homeworkers.
Photo: Elena Lukyanova / «Novaya Gazeta»
— Fraud with home voting usually consists of hiding and stuffing as many ballots as one's conscience allows into the ballot box.
There are many ways to track such falsifications, ”explains Udot. — Often, commission members simply come out with unrealistic numbers, for example, when calculating it turns out that during the round, they spent three minutes on one person, although in fact voting at home takes more time. You cannot go to court on this basis.
However, there are also more obvious cases of fraud. Udot cites the example of the situation at PEC No. 3487 in Moscow, where ballots for voting for single-mandate candidates were first put into the ballot box, and then for parties. This turned out to be noticeable due to the fact that one of the forms is greenish, and the other is bluish.
As Roman Udot suggests, the level of fraud in this election could be catastrophic. Despite the fact that the possibilities of observation are rather limited (this year only candidates, parties, election commissions and observers in public headquarters can follow what is happening in the polling stations in real time on a special portal, and on some cameras the view of the ballot boxes was blocked by balloons), observers have already record a significant number of violations. In total, on the first day of voting, according to the Golos movement, almost two thousand cases of violations were recorded.
Among the high-profile cases of violations — stuffing. In St. Petersburg, a man was caught throwing eight ballots into a ballot box. In the presence of the police, the guy «confessed» and said that he had received ballots from the Avtovo metro station. And in Balashikha near Moscow, observers from Yabloko counted three cases of ballot stuffing at polling station No. 3667. In addition, observers reported possible “roundabouts”, as well as less typical violations. Thus, in the Republic of Kalmykia, observers found a safe without a back wall, and in Voronezh, they found safes without a bottom.
Safe at plot 1413 in Voronezh. Photo: twitter / novosyolov
It is difficult to say which of the regions is leading in terms of violations: most of the information comes to the Voices project “Map of Violations” from Moscow, however, this rather indicates the activity of observers, says Udot. It is worth noting that Mosgorizbirkom monitors the platform, however, in its telegram channel, the commission mostly writes that in fact there is no violation of the law in the cases observed, without going into details.
According to Andrey Buzin, it is difficult to control the three-day voting. Not least because of the lack of human resources: the observers simply do not have enough strength for all three days. This is what makes it possible to expand the practice of falsification and makes it difficult to track cases of coercion to vote. Alexei Makarkin also notes that it is difficult to talk about the possibilities for fraud during the three-day voting, in Russia the experience is still not very large: last year's seven-day plebiscite and last year's regional elections.
— The opposition suspects that something may happen to the ballots at night. Representatives of the election commission say that nothing terrible will happen to them, the ballots are under strict control. So this election is a test for a three-day voting. Will there be scandals or not? Because it will not be possible to conceal the distortions anyway, ”political scientist Makarkin sums up.
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