First, take a look at this great document. Yes, I often write “a great document” or “a document of the era” — it can’t be helped. Ours is an era that produces astonishing documents, but this one is genuinely magnificent.
A brief backstory: a Reuters journalist decided to run an interesting experiment involving Russian elections. He went to a place where the polling station routinely reports turnout at around 95% and simply counted the voters.
It’s not as if he picked some absolute backwater — the village of Knyazevo, the nearest suburb of Ufa.
For this, he brought along a hand tally counter. That little clicker with a button you’ve seen a hundred times on airplanes — flight attendants use it to count passengers.
So he started counting. Just sat there, pressing the button.
I won’t invent anything of my own about what the election commission members felt as their world began to fall apart. It’s all in this document.
An object with radioactive properties in the pocket of his sweater. And the foreign spy sits there pressing it, emitting radiation onto Soviet citizens.
Mr. Stubbs was nearly thrown out of the polling station, but the Central Election Commission stepped in — they were trying to put on a show of “fair elections,” after all.
The result of the experiment exceeded all expectations:
Turnout was three times lower than at neighboring polling stations. This, by the way, fully confirms the theory that in regions where election results are simply fabricated every time, even fewer people go to the polls than in places where sometimes they fabricate them and sometimes they don’t (for example, Moscow).
United Russia’s result was a third lower than at neighboring polling stations, and so on.
Second, it is extremely important not to forget the Saratov story with 62.2%. I read, with amazement, the endless “political analysis” about the future speaker of the State Duma, Volodin, the dacha owner. People write all kinds of nonsense and discuss all sorts of things, even though the two most important facts about him — facts that define him as a person, a politician, and an administrator — are these: illegal enrichment on such a scale that he is not even capable of hiding it. obtaining a parliamentary mandate through fraud so blatant that he is not even capable of hiding that either.
That is where any analysis of this crook should begin.
By the way, take note of this popular explanation of all that complicated Saratov math: Volodin’s 62.2% in Saratov: a mathematical proof of fraud for dummies.
The blue hump is that very mathematical anomaly that Ella Pamfilova threatened to “explain away with the help of quantum physics”. The yellow graph is the reality of these “elections.”
And one more funny thing. As I keep saying, Volodin is an extraordinarily ambitious crook. It bothers him that he is supposedly such a great man — the speaker — and yet he will sit in the Duma on a stolen mandate. So he brought in his best minds to argue with mathematics, including Wasserman, the bearded man with the chocolate bar.
And do you know what the strongest argument they came up with was? The 2013 mayoral election:
Genius minds and virtuosos of Excel. They sorted through 3,600 polling stations in Moscow and picked out 21 where my result was 25%.
This nonsense is dissected in detail here:
That’s how mighty and great Volodin is.
Once again: this entire regime rests only on total censorship/lies in the media, election fraud, and coercive force (roughly speaking, police breaking up protests and fabricating criminal cases). Take away any one of these elements and nothing will remain.
To make up stories about “Volodin being smarter than Surkov” or “Kiriyenko being a more formidable thinker than Volodin” is to deceive ourselves and romanticize a simple process in which some woman lifts the lid of a plastic box and throws in a stack of ballots with the boxes already ticked.
That is the source of power.