The fraud complaint against Sobyanin and Rakova over their manipulations with Active Citizen, filed by Volkov, is absolutely right and necessary.
After our investigation into how the system works, there can be no doubt that the voting results are fake and that the votes themselves have no real effect.
However, *Active Citizen* must not under any circumstances be treated as just another routine tool for manipulating public opinion — some harmless fake voting app that nobody pays attention to.
They have already spent 185 million rubles on this “harmless voting app” — about 1.85 million euros / 2 million U.S. dollars at rough current rates — and they will spend much more.
Right now, Sobyanin’s city hall is pushing through amendments — already passed on first reading — that abolish public hearings in Moscow.
The abolition of public hearings and the replacement of public opinion with fake *Active Citizen* results are two parts of the same operation.
“You don’t like development in the park? Well, sorry, you’re in the minority — the vote on Active Citizen showed that Muscovites just love building over their parks, with compensatory landscaping somewhere around the 20th kilometer of Kaluga Highway. Want to gather local residents? No, you can’t — there are no public hearings, vote on Active Citizen instead.”
This is already how it works (“Muscovites supported the installation of a monument to Vladimir near the Borovitsky Gate”), and it will be expanded many times over unless we all declare a determined war both on the manipulations in AC and on the abolition of public hearings.
So Volkov deserves credit — he has started a process that matters to all of us, and we should support him. A post with details is here.
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