In the beautiful Russia of the future, there will of course be no idiotic signature collection requirement to take part in elections.
If a person or a party wants to participate in elections, then society has an interest in that and should encourage it. Restrictions against spam candidates are necessary, but they should be minimal. A small cash deposit. If signatures are required, then only a few, and in a way that makes them easy for any bona fide participant to collect. Here, people are always whining, “but what if there are 50 candidates on the ballot?” Well, so what if there are? Remember, I wrote about Schwarzenegger’s memoir, where he says that to run for governor of California, you only had to collect 65 signatures. Nothing terrible happened. In the end, the strongest candidate won in tough, competitive elections.
Here, collecting signatures is hellish work for the real opposition, which has to gather genuine signatures under requirements so strict that they become absurd in their rigidity (“Novosibirsk Obl.” instead of “Novosibirsk Region” is enough to invalidate a signature). For all sorts of fake, paper-only puppet parties, “collecting signatures” is no problem at all—they’ll get registered even with a stack of blank sheets.
For example, in every region where the Democratic Coalition is running, a party called ... “People’s Alliance” has also put itself forward. Remember? That’s our name, stolen by the crooks Volodin and Bogdanov.
It’s deeply unpleasant to read news reports saying that the “People’s Alliance” party has nominated candidates here or there, but that’s not even the main point. Kommersant writes that this puppet “People’s Alliance” has submitted collected signatures to the election commission. Alongside it are such “parties” as Rodina, Patriots of Russia, Civic Platform, Communists of Russia, the Communist Party of Social Justice, the Greens, and For Women of Russia.
To collect 17,000 signatures in Novosibirsk and submit 11,000 of them, we set up an entire campaign headquarters with about 30 people working there. We recruited volunteers and hired signature gatherers. Three hundred gatherers went into 100,000 apartment buildings and knocked on nearly every door. We built an information system. We report fake signature gatherers to the police. Every day, there were 5 to 7 campaign cubes—branded street stands commonly used in Russian political campaigning—set up in the city center. After all, 17,000 signatures is 1.5% of all voters in Novosibirsk. The whole city knows we were collecting signatures.
So it’s very easy to find traces of it. Type “RPR-PARNAS Novosibirsk signature collection” into a search engine. Photos, articles, announcements, and so on.
Now try searching for “People’s Alliance Novosibirsk signature collection”. Or “Civic Platform Novosibirsk signature collection”. Never mind “For Women of Russia Novosibirsk signature collection”.
Nothing. No one hired signature gatherers, no one recruited volunteers, no one organized headquarters, no pickets, no cubes. Tens of thousands of signatures appear out of thin air, while the residents of Novosibirsk themselves know nothing about having signed for the Rodina party.
And we see this in every region.
It’s a complete repeat of the Moscow City Duma election, where all the independent candidates were kicked off the ballot, while a bunch of puppet spoiler candidates were registered “based on signatures”—and then received fewer votes in the election than the number of people who had supposedly “signed” for them.
The election commissions are staffed by double criminals: they refuse to register independent candidates with legitimate signatures, while at the same time organizing and covering up forged signatures for stooge candidates.
Right now, as participants in the electoral process, we have representatives present during the acceptance and verification of signatures, and we can see with our own eyes how blatantly forged the signatures of these spoiler parties are. For example, Volkov writes about Civic Platform. Neat, pristine signatures—not a single smudge, not a single crossed-out line.
Anyone who has seen what a sheet looks like after five elderly people with poor eyesight have signed it understands perfectly well that a real signature sheet is a piece of paper that looks thoroughly worn.
Now we’re about to watch the wonderful spectacle of election commissions registering these “people’s alliances for the women of Mother Russia” all across the country, despite the obvious fraud. The only question is whether this will be accompanied by RPR-PARNAS being kicked off the ballot despite having genuine signatures.
In short, (and now a word from Captain Obvious) this whole signature-collection process is nonsense, stupidity, and serves only as a tool for undermining popular rule and democracy. In its current form, it must be abolished.