Press Release, 23.09.2020

On September 20, the Nizhny Novgorod regional branch of the Yabloko party held its conference. The conference adopted a statement “On non-recognition of the results of elections of deputies of the City Duma of Nizhny Novgorod of the seventh convocation”.

“On September 13, elections of deputies of the city Duma of Nizhny Novgorod of the seventh convocation took place. The Nizhny Novgorod regional branch of the Yabloko Party nominated 12 democratic candidates. From the first weeks of the campaign, our candidates faced strong counteraction from district electoral commissions. The collected signatures of voters [which the candidates are obliged to submit in favour of their nomination] were declared invalid without any real reason, electoral commissions went to all kinds of violations of the law. In a number of cases, district commissions forged documents in an attempt to remove our candidates from the election race,” runs Yabloko’s statement.

The Nizhny Novgorod regional branch of Yabloko also stressed that due to the machinations, half of the candidates were unlawfully denied registration. The electoral districts were swept of any competitors of the candidates supported by the authorities. The elections were marked by a huge number of falsifications, violations and abuses by electoral commissions.

In all constituencies without exception, there was an abnormally high number of voters who voted early. In some constituencies, early voting was many times higher than the turnout on the main voting day, September 13. At the same time, the overall turnout indicators did not increase, but, on the contrary, decreased. It becomes obvious that the voting was artificially prolonged for a week and a half with one goal only: to facilitate the process of falsification of the voting results and ensure the victory of certain candidates supported by the authorities.

According to members of electoral commissions, the envelopes for early voting with signatures of electoral commissions members disappeared from the vaults in the polling stations, but stacks of envelopes of unknown origin were put there instead. Some voters publicly reported that they found signatures of unknown persons on the voter lists who voted instead of them. Such machinations of the electoral commissions demonstrated their adjustment of the results to the desired candidates.

It became obvious that virtually all early voting ballots turned out to be a fake. The evidence of falsification is so clear that there is no reason to trust the results of such an early vote, Yabloko activists stress.

Yabloko lays the responsibility for the fraud by electoral commissions with the City Electoral Commission and personally with its Chair Marina Mamonova. The disregard for the norms of the law and the rights of candidates by the district electoral commissions was the result of direct instructions from the Chair of the City Electoral Commission.

Yabloko also notes that special attention should be paid to the tough pressure on observers at polling stations and the disruption of lectures for observers by the police on the eve of the elections. In the course of observing the early voting, observers and members of electoral commissions with an advisory vote were denied access to the documents and were prevented from exercising their powers. Two trainings for observers were disrupted by police officers, who for two days in a row kept people in the room where the trainings were held for several hours, demanded to testify, and intimidated the observers.

“The main goal of the elections is the implementation of the will of citizens. The past elections do not allow establishing the will of the residents of the city, and the city parliament elected in this way does not represent their interests,” the statement runs.

“We are convinced that the results of elections, which are organised in such a way, should not be recognised as valid. For this reason, the Nizhny Novgorod regional branch of the Yabloko Party considers it necessary to state the following:

1. We do not recognise the results of the past elections of deputies of the City Duma of Nizhny Novgorod of the seventh convocation, we demand to cancel the decision of the city electoral commission on the recognition of the election results and to hold repeated elections.

2. We demand to dismiss Marina Mamonova, Chairman of the city electoral commission, from her post together with the current members of the electoral commission and to form a new electoral commission.

3. We demand to amend the law of the Nizhny Novgorod region No. 108-З “On the election of deputies of the representative bodies of municipalities in the Nizhny Novgorod region” and establish the procedure for early voting exclusively in the premises of district and / or territorial electoral commissions.”