In Novosibirsk, the “Putin majority” is publicly falling apart. Neither Crimea, nor the war, nor Iskanders (Russian missile systems), nor “crucified boys” (a reference to Russian state propaganda), nor the Olympics, nor “traditional values,” nor the daily-hourly-secondly lies on every TV channel are enough to give United Russia a guaranteed majority in the regional parliaments of the country’s most important regions.
What they want is not 90% in Chechnya, but 90% in Novosibirsk’s Akademgorodok (the city’s famous research and university district) and in cities generally where the population is highly educated. But no matter what they do, they just can’t pull it off.
That is why it is crucial for them to keep the Democratic Coalition off the ballot, so that with low turnout the race is reduced to United Russia vs. the Communist Party, while the single-member districts have already been neatly divided up between the Communists and United Russia.
And so yesterday the working group of the Novosibirsk election commission declared that our signatures—the model example of a genuine signature drive—are invalid, and therefore RPR-PARNAS should not be allowed to participate in the election.
The election commission meeting where everything is supposed to be decided once and for all is on Monday evening, and the crooks were clearly counting on us not having enough time to beat back their claims.
They were wrong to hope for that. Volkov flew to Novosibirsk immediately, and our headquarters also knew perfectly well what to do on its own.
It was important for us to digitize every line, every signature rejected by the election commission, as quickly as possible and figure out why this had happened. To call each person, check their passport, and so on.
This is a massive undertaking, and it is still ongoing right now, but it is already clear that the election commission’s claims are completely baseless and fabricated for one purpose only: to keep us off the ballot. Briefly, here is how it works:
The essence of the election commission’s verification process is that they copy the data from our signature sheets and request matching data from the Federal Migration Service (FMS).
The FMS checks the data against its database and, if it finds even the slightest discrepancy—even a comma—it declares the signature invalid. And as you can imagine, this entire batch—11,000 signatures—has to be entered by hand twice during the verification process by clerks working at the FMS and the election commission. Human error inevitably comes into play.
Right now we are comparing the responses from the election commission and the FMS with the data in the “Zhnyets” system and with photocopies of the sheets.
Typical “bad signatures” look like this:
For example:
The Satdarov family: Zhnyets says these voters live at the same address, while the FMS replies that the addresses are different.
The election commission submitted a request using the surname Andryunshchenko, while on our signature sheet it is Andryushchenko, and in the FMS response it is also Andryushchenko.
There are citizens born in 1949, and on our signature sheets those voters listed their passport numbers. But the FMS database responds by saying that a citizen born in 1949 has not a passport, but a birth certificate!
The mistakes made by the election commission’s database operators are simply obvious: Burdenko Street is entered as Furdenko Street, and the signature is declared invalid even though everything is correct.
It is obvious that the election commission did not look at the FMS records at all: here is a completely correct address, yet it is declared invalid:
There are even downright absurd cases: according to the FMS, a person was removed from residence registration in 2016.
In some exceptional cases, the FMS claims that a street does not exist, even though the line above clearly shows that it does exist (the election commission’s spelling is preserved).
The election commission operator clearly entered the year of birth incorrectly as “199,” while the regional FMS office replies that the year of birth is 1997—exactly as it appears on our signature sheet!
In other words, all these “bad PARNAS signatures” are the result either of Novosibirsk election commission staff deliberately or carelessly copying data from our signature sheets incorrectly, or of the clumsy work of FMS database operators who rejected our signatures because our data does not show that a person moved somewhere in 2016, as their database claims.
You may say to me: this is a political issue, and the Kremlin’s decision is political, not based on squiggles on paper—and you would be absolutely right.
However, we will pursue this issue with the “squiggles” all the way through, so that by Monday, at the Novosibirsk election commission meeting, no one will have any doubt: we are 100% in the right, and any decision to bar RPR-PARNAS from the election can only be explained by United Russia’s fear of competing against us.
We demand registration and participation in the election. The residents of Novosibirsk Region have the right to vote for whomever they want, rather than choose from an artificial list of candidates “safe for United Russia.”
Thank you to everyone who supports us. Huge thanks to everyone doing tremendous work in Novosibirsk, who has already spent one sleepless night and, apparently, may have another one ahead. You are doing an amazing job.