Kudrin’s Committee of Civil Initiatives (KGI) (as I understand it, Kynev is the lead author) has released an interesting report on the 2015 elections. You can read a brief summary here.
Take a look if you want to understand what awaits us in 2016.
Two things struck me as especially important:
A clear trend toward reducing competition and barring from elections those who are “not supposed” to be allowed in. This applies both to single-member district candidates and to party lists.
The final unmasking of the “small parties” as nothing more than a tool for turning elections into chaos and a dumping ground. When needed, they are registered supposedly on the basis of collected signatures (despite the overall trend described in point 1), they play their assigned role, and end up getting fewer votes than the number of signatures they supposedly “collected.”
The “Party of Free Citizens,” which got eight times fewer votes than the number of signatures it supposedly “collected,” is, by the way, that same little clown of an “honest lawyer” who followed me around to every meeting shouting about the State Department.
So the State Duma 2016 scenario is this: strong opposition single-member candidates are kept off the ballot, strong candidates are purged from party lists as much as possible, there is “respectable competition” among United Russia, the Communist Party, A Just Russia, and the LDPR, and a horde of hellish spoiler parties turns any potential independent opposition campaign into trash.
We need to think about how to push back against all of this.