| By Sergei Mitrokhin
The level of falsifications in the Oct. 11 Moscow City Duma
elections was unprecedented in modern Russian history. Officials
did everything in their power to prevent opposition candidates
from registering, and Yabloko was obstructed by local authorities
and siloviki structures as early on as the signature collection
stage.
On Oct. 10, the eve of the elections, almost every electoral
district had run out of ballots. According to Yabloko representatives,
the Strogino election committee handed out a total of only
149 ballots for the entire district. Instead, we witnessed
the so-called “carousel” system — busloads of passengers who
travel from district to district to cast their votes repeatedly.
We received reports of large-scale ballot stuffing across
the city. Buses filled with dozens of passengers pulled up
to polling stations. After they presented their passports,
election officials gave them huge stacks of absentee ballots.
Later, signatures would magically appear on the polling station’s
voter lists alongside the names of so-called “dead souls”
— people who hadn’t voted for years or who had died long ago.
A Yabloko observer at a Tagansky polling station caught a
glimpse of one such list with marks made beside about 60 names.
In the Arbat district, all of the teachers from one of the
local schools used absentee ballots to vote, meaning that
82 people from various districts of Moscow converged on the
polling station within the walls of their own school to cast
their votes.
Various municipal and social workers were also compelled to
spend their Sunday at the polling stations where, in violation
of the law, they served as election officials. Social workers
were also eager to make “house calls,” giving people the opportunity
to vote at home. Social workers even “helped” pensioners to
vote at polling stations.
At one polling station in the Otradnoye district, workers
handed pensioners ballots with the United Russia candidates
already selected. When observers at the scene requested that
they stop violating the rules, members of the district election
committee replied that the elderly people were suffering from
poor eyesight and had specifically requested the assistance.
At some polling stations, people stuffed bundles of ballots
into ballot boxes with opposition observers and policemen
watching them. At one polling station in the Akademichesky
district, a Yabloko candidate for the City Duma, Sergei Markov,
caught two young people stuffing a ballot box, but the policeman
on duty initially refused to detain them. Only after Markov
insisted and spoke to the policeman’s commander did the officer
finally intervene.
Among the more curious incidents was the discovery in the
Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya district of a “reserve” voting district
not found anywhere on the Moscow election committee’s official
list. There was also an incident in the Severnoye Medvedkovo
district where private security agents closed a polling station
to all voters between 8 a.m. and 9.30 a.m. What happened inside
the building during those 90 minutes is anybody’s guess. Similarly,
it is unclear what happened at a polling station in the Meshchansky
district after the election committee ordered the police to
evict all Yabloko observers — and even election candidates
who were present — from the premises.
After the votes were counted at the polling stations, the
chairs of the various neighborhood election committees met
at a district election committee, and this is where the main
instances of falsification took place. Yabloko observer Vitaly
Reznikov witnessed how the vote tallies from the individual
neighborhoods were “corrected” according to the instructions
of the ranking election authority. Reznikov recounts seeing
the chairs of the district committees go into the office of
their superiors and only afterward were their vote tallies
entered into the general database. Marina Ivannikova, a member
of Yabloko and the Levoberezhny district election committee,
saw entirely new tallies “drawn up” at their meeting.
Blatant falsification could be the only explanation for the
discrepancy between a notarized copy of the vote tally from
District 1,702 that Yabloko obtained and the official figures
announced for the same district — a discrepancy of 550 votes
in United Russia’s favor. Only falsifiers in the district
election committee could have “shifted” 20 of 25 votes received
by Yabloko into the United Russia column at District 1,701.
The most ludicrous example of falsification occurred at District
192, where my family and I are registered and where we cast
our votes on election day. Video footage on Ren-TV clearly
showed me placing my own vote on Oct. 11, but after the polls
closed the official election returns showed the figure “0”
for the Yabloko party in my district.
One exception to the falsification was the polling station
where Prime Minister Vladimir Putin voted. Here, a command
was apparently handed down not to falsify in a district directly
associated with Putin. As a result, Yabloko garnered 18 percent
of the vote there.
You might ask why the current authoritarian regime resorted
to bringing in busloads of voters to stuff ballot boxes. The
answer is that the authorities want very much to look like
it is a democracy to the outside world. The more autocratic
Russia becomes, the more Russia has to falsify its fragile
democratic institutions.
Equally important, the authorities want to create the impression
that the Russian people overwhelmingly support United Russia
and its candidates. The problem is that this farce is becoming
increasing difficult to pull off with each successive falsification.
Sergei Mitrokhin, who served as a State Duma deputy from 1994
to 2003 and a Moscow City Duma deputy from 2005 to 2009, is
chairman of the Yabloko party.
See also:
Elections
to the Moscow City Duma 2009
|
