In connection with this piece of cheating that Sobyanin called “primaries”, I want to say two things:
First, to say a kind word for the Coordinating Council elections. Not for the Coordinating Council itself—it obviously never really came together—but for the elections to it: they were the best part of the whole project, and the Council was useful if only because we got to see them happen.
Compare:
In the Coordinating Council elections, 97,000 people were verified and 81,000 voted. And that was despite the fact that a criminal case was opened against Volkov at the end, every possible resource was used against us, and during the voting the system was hit by an attack and went down for a while. The pressure was serious, for those who remember.
In the Moscow “primaries,” 220,000 people voted. And that was with the whole city plastered with advertising—28,000 ad spaces—TV flooded with ads, practically every existing “show-business star” enlisted to promote this garbage, schools and clinics used as polling stations (no administrative pressure at all!), public-sector employees herded to the polls, 2 million text messages sent out, and so on and so forth.
The budgets are impossible to compare—they differ by orders of magnitude. The Coordinating Council elections cost 3.8 million rubles (about US$110,000 at the time). The “primaries” are hard to estimate—how do you even calculate the cost of opening schools all over Moscow for voting?—but in total spending, I think it was no less than 1 billion rubles (about US$29 million at the time). There was even an official figure of 50 million rubles, but of course we do not believe that all those singers and dancers promoted it for free, or that stunts like these cost nothing either.
Of course, this tells us not only—or even mainly—about the incompetence and thievery of Sobyanin’s PR people (though those qualities are plainly on display), but about the fact that it is very hard to fake a voluntary democratic process. Yes, there is television and 28,000 advertising spaces, but nobody actually goes to vote.
The results of the “winners” show just how impossible the candidate-registration rules set by United Russia are for real elections. Every independent candidate has to collect more than 5,000 signatures, while the “winners” received fewer votes than that themselves (with very rare exceptions). Look at the results here: in first place are candidates with 1,000 to 3,000 votes. In other words, they are telling us: we will let you run only if you can collect 6,000 signatures under conditions where we are actively obstructing you. Meanwhile, they themselves can only gather 2,000 supporters even when clinic doctors are being driven to the polls. We will have to do our best to help independent candidates collect signatures, since Sobyanin and United Russia so clearly do not want that.