Press Release, 18.05.2021

Photo: Campaign leaflet by Ksenia Sverdlova

By-elections to the regional parliament of the Saratov region took place past week-end. Yabloko’s candidates ran in three of the four vacant single-mandate constituencies. Ksenia Sverdlova, Chair of the regional department of Yabloko, ran in the Volzhsky district, Ilya Kozlyakov, Deputy Chairman of the party branch, ran in Kalininsky district, and Dmitry Lepensky ran in Marksovsky district. The total number of voters in the three districts was 250,000 people. The single slogan of the campaign was “It is time for the smart. Time for the honest. Yabloko’s time”.

Ksenia Sverdlova summed up the campaign results on her Facebook page:

Dear Friends, By-elections to the Saratov Regional Duma have taken place. I want to thank everyone who was not lazy and came to the polling stations!

Our team – the team of the YABLOKO party – did everything possible and impossible so that your votes were counted honestly! It was very difficult. Dishonest members of electoral commissions tried every trick and violations of the law in order to rig the results and hinder our observers. I talked about this in detail on my broadcasts during voting. Now our lawyers continue working to ensure that all violators of the law are punished.

I would like to highlight three important results of this election campaign.

1. The candidate from YABLOKO for the first time received over 10.5% of the votes at the elections to the regional Duma in Saratov (for comparison, 8.2% voted for me in the same district in September 2020). This is a real claim of the list of the party candidates for passing to the State Duma. I would also like to note that our candidate for the Marksovsky constituency, Dmitry Lipensky, has overcome the 5% barrier. And we are certain that he received a higher percentage of votes if we could have covered rural polling stations with observers. We would like to thank Dmitry for the honest election campaign he conducted for the first time.

2. In the constituency, where we covered all polling stations with high-quality observation, the turnout was almost ten times lower than in constituencies without observers. Now we know exactly the scope of the falsifications. And it is astonishing… 5% of the turnout in the Volhsky consitituency against 47%, for example, in the Kalininsky district, where Ilya Kozlyakov ran.

3. Only 2.5% of voters in Volzhsky District No. 1 voted for the United Russia’s candidate. And we know for sure that the majority did it under tremendous pressure from their bosses. We believe that 95% of those who did not come to the elections is a huge reserve, first and foremost, for really oppositional candidates, and not for those who were asked to run.

This is what we will work on!

Photo: The photo shows the procedure for canceling unused ballots that could have become votes for a different power, but citizens did not use them.