Press release, 23.09.2016
YABLOKO Chair Emilia Slabunova stated that YABLOKO did not recognise the election results at the final meeting of the Central Electoral Commission.
On the night of 22 September the Central Electoral Commission held the final meeting on the results of the election to the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation of the 7th convocation. The leaders of the parties which entered the parliament were not present. As the report was announced, YABLOKO leader Emilia Slabunova was the first to take the floor to state that YABLOKO Federal Political Committee did not recognise the election results.

“Our statement is not connected with the results which YABLOKO gained,” Slabunova stressed. “This estimation has very serous grounds.” The main thing is that for the first time in modern history of Russia the voters turnout turned appeared to be very low and the parliament was elected by the minority of the citizens.

“This is the evidence that people turned away from the government, turned their back on it. So, the question is: how did the government manage to discredit the State Duma, discredit itself, lose people’s trust so that they do not want to participate in elections any longer? I think that our estimation would not ring so hard even with such low voters turnout but for such rate of violations, which took place,” she said.

Slabunova said that, according to some unofficial evidence, the real turnout made 35 per cent and the official results were brought to the numbers written in the report of the Central Electoral Commission using “different means”.

“First of all, they maintained a special operation to lower the real voters turnout,” she said. According to Slabunova, the following methods were used: the voting day [in December] was transferred to September [in order to leave the summer season for election campaign], as little information on the forthcoming election as possible was announced, the administrative resource was used to a great extent to force employees of a government-financed organization vote for the ruling party.

All the violations which took place together with lowest voting turnout does not allow YABLOKO recognise the election results published by the Central Electoral Commission.

Moreover, Emilia Slabunova mentioned that the small number of election observers also illustrated the fact that the population had ignored the election. Even the participants of mass protests of 2011 did not feel like participating in the election process.

“Taking into consideration all the efforts of the Central Electoral Commission to boost the confidence in elections, we may face the situation when neither voters nor election observers participate in the election next time,” Slabunova addressed head of the Central Electoral Commission Ella Pamfilova.

“The State Duma which was formed this way does not represent the Russian society. Now we should realise that after this decision [to recognise the election results by the Central Electoral Commission] is made the State Duma we would not be able to consider the State Duma as the body of people’s representation. It means that the confidence in government will continue to decrease. We will leave this meeting with the question who is going to participate in the elections in five years’ time, and it may happen so that they will take place earlier,” YABLOKO leader concluded.