I keep forgetting to share the important news: we won in the Constitutional Court against both Churov and the crooks from the Novosibirsk election commission who kept us off the ballot.
As you may remember, PARNAS and the democratic coalition list were removed from the ballot in the Novosibirsk Region because the data of voters who had signed in support of the list allegedly “did not match the Federal Migration Service database.”
The local election commission, all the courts, and then Churov’s Central Election Commission confirmed this: if your sex is male, but the Federal Migration Service database says “female,” then it is not you, your mother, your passport, or your birth certificate that should be believed, but the Federal Migration Service database.
The symbol of this whole saga became “Darya Timurovich.”
A young woman named Darya Teymurovna — in her passport and in every other document all her life — had her signature ruled invalid because in the sacred Federal Migration Service database she was listed as “Darya Timurovich.”
The absurdity was obvious to everyone; the case even led to a hunger strike, but the election still went ahead without us. It should be noted that voters in the region did not like these tricks either: turnout was low, and spoiled ballots reached a full 6% — a completely unprecedented figure, something not seen even during past campaigns urging voters to spoil their ballots.
We “lost” every subsequent court case as well, including in the Supreme Court, which stated that all the evidence we had gathered could not be taken into account, because there was a certificate from the regional office of the Federal Migration Service.
In the end, we made it to the Constitutional Court, which, though terribly cowardly, is still staffed by people who consider themselves legal theorists.
They were afraid to issue a formal ruling of the court — because such a ruling could serve as grounds for reviewing earlier court decisions — but they did issue a determination setting out a legal position, and most importantly:
Of course, this does not make things any easier for the residents of the Novosibirsk Region, where United Russia once again unlawfully grabbed the majority of seats, but recognition that we were right both morally and legally is still something.
We also hope that, thanks to our victory, it will now be a little harder to throw people off the ballot.
We will restore legal justice definitively at the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights), where we have already filed our complaint.
Once again, thank you to everyone who supported us then, both in Novosibirsk and across the country.
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