Take a look, unpleasant as it is.
What kind of scoundrels, villains, and outright monsters are in charge of elections and “delivering the result” at Moscow City Hall?
Turnout in today’s Moscow elections is catastrophically low. And that is a fully deliberate strategy approved by Sobyanin and Deputy Mayor Rakova.
Against this low turnout, we once again see an astonishingly high level of “at-home voting.”
The idea is that elderly or ill people who really want to vote but find it difficult to get to the polling station call the election commission, and officials come to their home with a ballot box.
Now look at this. Does this woman look like someone who wants to vote? Does it look like she filed a request saying, “Come to my home with a ballot box”?
It’s very simple. Moscow social workers compile lists of the people in their care, then fill out requests for at-home voting on their behalf (which is explicitly prohibited by law). On election day, a social worker goes around to them again, reminding them whom to vote for and leaving behind a little calendar with the candidates’ names.
Then they come to their homes with the ballot box, either forcing these poor elderly people to vote or exploiting their helplessness by simply tricking them—showing them where to put the checkmark or slipping them that little calendar.
Here, Volkov describes the scheme in detail:
Unfortunately, we know it all too well from the 2013 mayoral election, when it was precisely through at-home voting that Sobyanin stole the 2–3% of votes he needed for a “first-round victory.”
So, fundamentally, there’s nothing new here. But scheme or no scheme, ballot stuffing or no ballot stuffing—how the hell can they treat elderly people like this?
They have turned them into their main electoral weapon. Quite literally, the election victories of Putin, United Russia, and their deputies and governors across the country are built on votes extracted from sick elderly people through deception and coercion.
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