A sympathetic insider told us that, in response to our “Barvikha experiment,” the elections in this small settlement were “taken upstairs” to higher authorities, where they decided not to remove anyone from the ballot—supposedly because that is exactly what Navalny wants. So the conclusion was that they had to win electorally.
That is how they define two types of election victories. An administrative one (when candidates are removed from the ballot or not allowed to run at all, as in Novosibirsk or Magadan) and an electoral one (when you let them run, but go after them with everything you have and, in the end, swamp them at the polls, as in Kostroma).
So in Barvikha, the order was given to win electorally. Otherwise, a terrible truth would come out: the new head of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, is no different from the old one, Vladimir Churov.
Only, as they say in the village of Usovo-Tupik in the Barvikha rural settlement: it looked smooth on paper, but they forgot about the pitfalls. It turns out it is not so easy to win if you cannot remove inconvenient candidates from the ballot.
So this is what an “electoral victory” looks like:
They fabricate and open a criminal case against Zhdanov.
They then rush out a huge print run of a local newspaper issue about a criminal trying to grab a cushy council seat (judging by the timing, it even looks as if it was printed before the official announcement that the case had been opened):
They announce early voting—for a full eight days—and register batches of random nobodies in the local villages, and then they show up and “express their will.” It is very important to understand this: the Barvikha settlement is small, and with low turnout and strong competition, 100 people voting the same way can completely change the outcome of the election.
Yesterday they were bussing in some paid Nashi and Young Guard activists (pro-Kremlin youth movements).
Today even migrants have started showing up:
These guys are being registered, with very little attempt at concealment, in houses and mini-hotels owned by members of United Russia. It is fairly easy to verify—Ivan explains everything here.
“Why don’t you file complaints?” some naive person might ask. We do—and here is the original way Vildanov, the head of the Moscow Region election commission, responds to our complaints:
We also filed a complaint with the Central Election Commission, but so far nothing has changed. These suddenly appearing voters, registered by United Russia at “rubber apartments” (addresses used to register large numbers of people), keep streaming into the territorial election commission and casting ballots.
That is the kind of election this is.