Well, there you go—you said there was no point in voting.
I didn’t ask that for nothing:
https://twitter.com/navalny/status/472314997557571585 Incidentally, I didn’t get a single reply saying, "Yes, I know who that is."
Just to uncover such vivid, wonderful facts, it was worth poking this disgusting snake pit called the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation with a stick.
Nobody knows who this is:
But you should know. This is the most popular public figure in Russia among Russian internet users.
It is Vladimir Ivanovich Fisinin of the Russian Poultry Union who is leading the online vote that will determine one third of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation.
Out of curiosity, go here and look at the top three in each category. These are all the people who have been "elected" to the "Tent" (a mocking nickname for the Civic Chamber). Yes, you can already say elected, because voting ends today at midnight.
What’s especially rich is that genuinely well-known people among the "winners," such as Nikolai Drozdov and Konstantin Raikin, got ten times fewer votes than some random nobodies.
If you try to find even the slightest trace online of campaigning for these "vote leaders," you won’t find anything at all. Some guy named Novorok is "getting" almost 40,000 verified votes while having 898 followers on Twitter and not posting a single tweet or Facebook post asking anyone to support his candidacy.
Now that’s the real power of the internet! Votes just materialize out of nowhere and go to whoever they’re supposed to go to.
Needless to say, the poor pair of independent candidates who had been leading the vote back when it was still real have become not just outsiders, but absolute losers. Grigory Melkonyants from Golos (Russia’s independent election-monitoring movement) had been ahead of his nearest rival by a factor of two, and now has 8,800 votes.
And the winner in his "anti-corruption" section, some guy named Slepak, has four times as many.
How? By what mechanism? You’ve never heard of any Slepak? That doesn’t matter. What matters is that, as his campaign platform, he posted a song written and performed by himself:
"Go forward, Vladimir Putin," Slepak sings to Putin. "Go forward into the Civic Chamber," Putin replies to Slepak.
So it is Vladimir Anatolyevich Slepak, with his song, who will be our chief "internet public representative" in charge of fighting corruption.
It seems to me that our small voting effort achieved its goal. Once they realized just how badly the authorities were losing in an honest vote, they staged fraud on such a scale that even Kadyrov (Ramzan Kadyrov, head of Chechnya) with his 99% for Putin on 99% turnout looks tame by comparison.
Here are a few pieces on ballot stuffing and vote-rigging:
Civic Chamber candidates demand an explanation: the sharp increase in the number of votes cast for certain candidates, who soon became leaders in their categories, began on May 12–13; since then they have been gaining votes by the hundreds without running any visible campaign http://www.vedomosti.ru/politics/news/27057851/kandidaty-trebuyut-audita
Pre-election battles in the Civic Chamber: It is hard to understand what the organizers of the mass bussing-in of voters were aiming for—preventing a single independent candidate from getting into the Civic Chamber, or simply creating the appearance of serious competition http://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/news/26510801/borba-za-mesto-dlya-diskussij
Carousel-style vote rigging: elections to Russia’s Civic Chamber are underway. The attempt to choose Civic Chamber members via the internet ended in scandal. Voting from the lobby of the Civic Chamber was permanently halted on Wednesday, May 14 at 6:00 p.m. (because starting on May 6, "carousels" had been taking place there—voters were being bused in). http://www.mk.ru/politics/2014/05/14/karusel-s-nakrutkoy-v-obschestvennoy-palate-priznali-internetvyiboryi-byili-sfalsifitsirovanyi.html
Civic Chamber candidates suspected of bribery. Candidates are abusing administrative resources, the working group acknowledged. But only one contender filed a request to withdraw http://www.vedomosti.ru/politics/news/26511171/narodno-administrativnyj-resurs
Melkonyants on what was done to keep him from getting through http://www.echo.msk.ru/blog/melkonyants/1324026-echo/ Alena Popova against falsifications http://oprf.alenapopova.ru
But all these links, I would say, are completely unnecessary. Vladimir Ivanovich from the poultry union has already put everything in its proper place.