So here you have a neat symbolic ending to the story of “Ella Pamfilova and her honest elections.”
Pamfilova’s Central Election Commission has officially proposed reappointing Gorbunov as head of the Moscow election commission.
Gorbunov is not just one of the chief organizers of election fraud. For years, he rigged elections for Luzhkov and the Kremlin, and now for Sobyanin and the Kremlin.
He deserves the biggest medal “For Falsifications and Their Consequences” — it was under his leadership that the notorious large-scale ballot stuffing in Moscow was organized during the 2011 State Duma elections.
The ballot stuffing led to rallies. The rallies led to arrests. The arrests led to the entire protest movement of 2011–2013. So it would not be an exaggeration to say that the methods of fraud used by Gorbunov’s system and the Moscow City Election Commission were an important cause of the largest political protests in Russia since the late 1980s.
In 2013, Gorbunov organized fraud in off-site voting, stuffed 2.5% of the vote for Sobyanin, and secured his “victory” in the first round. After that, all Moscow courts refused to consider our complaints.
By the way, we also found undeclared property belonging to the Gorbunov family in Croatia.
And now this same man will continue organizing “elections” in the country’s largest city, home to 10% of its population. Using the same tried-and-tested methods:
In short, this was clear to us from the very beginning (see our “Barvikha experiment”). It just turned out almost too perfectly.
After declaring, “I will do everything to make sure Bolotnaya does not happen again” (a reference to the Bolotnaya protests in Moscow), first helping stuff 11 million votes in the State Duma elections, and now also reappointing Gorbunov in Moscow.
Most importantly, don’t forget those crooks, hacks, and sellouts — from “journalists” to “opposition politicians” — who, after Pamfilova’s appointment, ran around parroting Volodin’s talking points and squealing about what great elections there would be now and what a breakthrough this was. I remember how many columns were written claiming that our “Barvikha experiment” was a provocation. And then, later, that Pamfilova had triumphantly proved her independence through the Barvikha case.
Our position remains unchanged. No elections in Russia are fair. Realistically recognizing this, one may still take part even in unfair elections, provided that genuinely independent deputies and parties are allowed to participate. But a process from which genuinely opposition and independent candidates have been excluded cannot be called “elections,” even in quotation marks.
It is on these simple rules that one should base one’s attitude toward elections, rather than looking at whom they appointed to the Central Election Commission and how thin their voice is. A fraudulent regime can appoint only a fraudster there; otherwise, it simply would not survive.