Let's do it this way: first, let's establish what happened, and then I'll give my opinion on it.
What happened:
About 16,000 people registered as voters in the primaries, with confirmed email addresses.
Four thousand people took part in the vote, after which information leaked that Vyacheslav Maltsev, creator of the blog Artpodgotovka, was leading the race.
The next day—the voting lasted two days—the PARNAS website published a news item titled "The second day of voting in the primaries is underway." The site administrator was supposed to attach hashed data that would allow the vote to be analyzed without revealing who voted for whom. Instead, a file was attached containing the full unencrypted data of all voters, including their passwords.
Naturally, a huge scandal erupted. PARNAS was silent at first, then claimed it was an "administrator error", and later said it was a "hack by the security services." The voting was halted. In total, 7,400 people had voted.
Today, the PARNAS party decided to form its election list without taking the primaries into account, since their results cannot be determined.
The leading positions before the voting was stopped looked like this:
Here's what I would like to say about it:
A) The most important thing is to distinguish organizational and technical error/incompetence/helplessness from deliberate political fraud. I'm seeing posts now claiming that the PARNAS leadership deliberately published the data in order to fulfill their fondest dream and abandon the primaries.
I do not believe that, but that version should be examined by an independent commission.
There were no FSB (Russia's Federal Security Service) plots and no hack—it's complete nonsense. Here's a fairly detailed breakdown. At one point, the PARNAS leadership effectively took over the creation of the primaries' technical infrastructure. Why was the decision made to move the voting dates from April 23–24 to May 28–29? Because the day before, the Democratic Coalition's working group discovered that the entire PARNAS website was being handled by two people, one of them working remotely from Kazan. Both were earning 70,000 rubles a month (roughly around $1,000 at the time). Nothing worked, the poor programmer—who was also the designer—was overwhelmed and couldn't keep up. A total disaster.
By that point, we had almost left the coalition, but I still hoped the PARNAS leadership would at least solve the technical problems. You simply cannot go into a federal election if you can't build a proper primaries website and spend a couple of million rubles on it (tens of thousands of U.S. dollars at the time). As it turns out, they didn't.
Under the rules, encrypted hash data was supposed to be published on the second day of voting. Maybe it simply didn't exist, maybe they mixed up the files, maybe the only programmer hadn't slept for three days. In any case, they published voters' personal data.
A failure, incompetence, an inability to solve even basic problems. That's why I wrote that the executive leadership of PARNAS should resign instead of inventing stories about the FSB.
If there are no resignations and no organizational consequences, that will be sad. How are these same people supposed to run an election campaign? Especially one supposedly focused on the internet.
The main thing now is to create an independent commission, audit the website, and honestly refute the claims that the primaries were deliberately sabotaged. The CEC (Central Election Commission) there is decent; it will not cover up fraud.
B) The results of the primaries must be recognized. And there's no need to write that "some obscure Maltsev somehow won." It's perfectly clear. This Maltsev has a YouTube channel with nearly 100,000 subscribers. His videos—political commentary—get 50,000 to 60,000 views on average. He has a stable group of devoted followers. And for two months he kept hammering the message: register and vote. He even made a special video guide.
Maltsev behaved exactly as a candidate should—he worked with his support base. He mobilized 5,000 people, and that's why he won with turnout so low.
Go look at the social media accounts of PARNAS leaders Kasyanov and Merzlikin, count how many posts they've made over the past two months saying "come to the primaries"—spoiler: you won't find ten—and compare that with Maltsev. That is the answer to the question, "Why did Maltsev win?"
A total of 5,471 people voted for Maltsev, and more than half of them voted only for Maltsev, which gave him a decisive lead.
If PARNAS had worked properly, the way we did in the regional primaries or in the elections to the Coordination Council (an opposition coordinating body, often abbreviated as KS)—where there were no "hacks" and no running results were announced during the vote—and had brought in at least 20,000 voters, then Maltsev would have placed lower, facing serious competition.
Read Volkov's excellent post on this subject.
Otherwise, the leaders of the vote look exactly as predicted: Zubov, Jankauskas, Lyaskin. There is no reason not to recognize the results.
If Vyacheslav Maltsev from Saratov showed more will to win and more campaigning ability than the entire PARNAS leadership, then he is exactly the one who should win. That's what primaries are for—so that someone new can come in and shake up the cozy little world of the party nomenklatura, which has grown used to doing nothing.
Who expected Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee? But he took advantage of the helplessness of the Republican establishment and became exactly that.
Maltsev did the same thing. It wasn't bots voting for him—it was people. So what exactly is the complaint against him?
A year ago, in the regional primaries that we organized, 1,104 voters cast ballots in Novosibirsk Region alone. Here, by contrast, PARNAS attracted only 2,500 people nationwide if you subtract Maltsev's votes. Neither the Kremlin nor the FSB is to blame.
C) The main reason for the failure is fear of voters and fear of competition. Just look at them—they're all trembling. Oh no, nationalists will swarm in and vote. Oh no, Navalny's supporters will swarm in—he has an advantage online. Oh no, Maltsev's people swarmed in—he has a cult following.
Better to keep things quiet—a little congress, a little political council, a little meeting. Otherwise they might swarm in.
Then make it so that people start swarming somewhere because of you. Who is it that swarms in? The public. That's what people are like—work with them. There won't be any other people, and until you learn how to call on them to swarm somewhere, nothing will come of it.
People need to swarm to polling stations too. For now, the fact is that V. Maltsev will clearly draw more people than M. Kasyanov.
For 13 years, democrats have had no presence in the State Duma precisely because of this fear of people. "We know better who should be on the list." Well, if you know so well, then enjoy your 2.1 percent. See you in five years.
D) The party that is not afraid of voters, not afraid of debates, not afraid of primaries, and not afraid of competition is called the Progress Party. It has been barred from the elections precisely because it can both organize a campaign and win an election.
What happened once again reminded me of the obvious: the path to victory lies in securing the right to participate in elections, not in consolidating around the "holders of the license."