Press Release, 16.09.2019

Lawyers of the St.Petersburg branch of Yabloko will challenge the results of municipal elections in the city in 12 electoral districts where they were rigged. At least 24 mandates were stolen from Yabloko only through direct substitution of reals bulletins by fakes and subsequent recounting of ballots.

Maxim Katz, head of the Yabloko election headquarters in the St. Petersburg municipal elections, noted that the elections were held with many violations by different electoral commissions, however, even against this background, there was a whole group of gross violations of the law that have to be dealt with urgently, lawsuits should be immediately filed and maximum publicity should be given to the cases. Such violations include substitution of ballots, falsification of election results through the technology of putting checkmarks in the ballots with the following “recount”.

“In a number of districts where Yabloko candidates won, electoral commissions simply substituted the ballots at night, or drew checkmarks in them opposite the names of the required candidates, and then announced a vote count, or the electoral commissions ran away with the ballots from the place of counting on the voting days, and then they returned with other ballots and counted already these [new] ballots,” Maxim Katz said.

“Such violations make it completely impossible to determine the results in the polling stations where they occurred. This is a spit in the face of the people who voted, and their ballots were thrown out having been substituted. We will apply to courts for all such violations. At the moment, we have several dozen such cases. As a rule, these are falsifications of the results at some polling stations, and we will ask the court to annul the elections there,” added the head of the Yabloko election headquarters in the St. Petersburg municipal elections

It should be noted that Yabloko nominated more than 400 candidates for municipal deputies of St. Petersburg, 95 candidates won the elections and obtained mandates despite election fraud.