I can’t resist commenting once again on the “signatures” that various small pro-Kremlin parties submit in order to take part in elections. It’s the same in every region, but here I’ll use Novosibirsk Region as an example, where a large number of signatures is required—11,000—and that is an enormous undertaking, which I have written about extensively.
The clearest example is the signatures submitted by the People’s Alliance party, which existed solely to steal our name.
Under the law, signature collection can begin only after the candidate list has been certified. The People’s Alliance list was certified on July 17, 2015. The deadline for submitting signatures was July 19, which means People’s Alliance had two days to open a bank account, collect the signatures, pay for them, deal with binding them into booklets, and have the signatures certified by an authorized representative. Based on our experience, all those technical details take at least a full day, which means People’s Alliance had just one day left for the actual collection. 11,000 signatures. 1,000 signatures per hour. For comparison, the highest number of signatures we ever collected in a single day was 1,404—and that was after a weekend.
The same goes for the Communists of Russia party, whose verification our lawyers attended yesterday. At least a third of the signatures were dated July 14. Nearly 4,000 signatures in a single day. That would mean gathering thousands of people in a stadium—yet no one in Novosibirsk noticed anything like that.
The Green Party’s submission consists of perfectly neat folders, each containing 300 signature sheets and 900 signatures. Not a single crossed-out entry. Anyone who has ever collected signatures knows it is impossible not to have even one crossed out.
Civil Platform’s signatures are also lined up in perfectly neat rows, all with the same slant. The signatures do not match the surnames (if someone’s name is, for example, Anton Ivanov, it is unlikely that his signature would contain the letters “D,” “U,” and “E”). And the handwriting of the dates in the certification notes differs from the handwriting in the signature lines themselves. You do not need to be a handwriting expert to see that the dates were written by the same person—which is prohibited.
At the same time, the members of the election commission understand all this perfectly well and, in hallway conversations, agree that these parties’ signatures are obviously fabricated.
Why am I writing all this? Frankly, I don’t care about this fake “People’s Alliance” or this fake “Civil Platform”—let them participate in the elections. I have already written that signature collection in its current form is absurd. It’s just that today a working group of that same election commission will decide whether to allow RPR-PARNAS (the Republican Party of Russia–People’s Freedom Party) onto the ballot with our exemplary, genuinely collected signatures.
And of course, our attitude toward these elections—or “elections”—must take into account whether only genuine parties are allowed to participate, whether everyone is allowed in, or whether only fake ones are.
