Press Release, 12.02.2019

The Saratov regional branch of the Yabloko party appealed to the Electoral Commission of the Saratov Region with a request to check on the facts given in an interview with Inna Dozorova, the former head of the Saratov Kindergarten N 83, where she told that she had had to participate in the election fraud on the order of the administration of the Leninsky district of Saratov. Dozorova described specific fraud mechanisms and gave the names of the organisers of the crime.

“For the first time it was publicly confirmed what everyone participating in the elections in the region in a particular status knows and which was reflected in our party’s numerous statements on the results of the past election campaigns,” runs the statement of the Saratov branch of Yabloko.

Activists of the regional branch of the party expressed their confidence that if the packs with the ballots were opened and the ballots were recalculated, the facts stated in an interview with Dozorova would have been confirmed.

“Considering the fact that the official election results in the city and the region were close on average and differed little from the results for the Leninsky district of the city of Saratov, this confession gives every reason to believe that this practice is typical of the entire electoral system of the region,” is indicated in the statement of Saratov Yabloko.

At the elections of 2016, more than 100 electoral commissions in the city of Saratov showed identical results during voting on the lists to the State Duma of the Russian Federation (62.2 per cent for the United Russia party).

In 2017, in the gubernatorial elections, due to the “Positive Boycott” campaign held by the Yabloko regional office, gross violations of electoral law were revealed. During the action Yabloko members called on their supporters not to drop the ballots into the ballot boxes, but to take them out from the polling stations. However, in the official results in the GAS Election System the number of ballots issued at the premises coincided with the number of ballots found in the ballot boxes, despite the fact that many voters took their ballots with them from the polling stations without dropping them into the ballot boxes.

The scandal became nationwide. The head of the city of Saratov, the Chairman of the Regional Electoral Commission, Chairpersons of all city territorial electoral commissions and dozens of chairpersons of electoral commissions at polling stations lost their posts. However, Yabloko did not succeed in obtaining a court decision on the opening of packs of ballots and the recounting of ballots, in spite of the fact that the plaintiffs had irrefutable evidence in their hands in the form of original ballots, which, according to official protocols, had to be in sealed packs rather than in voters’ hands.