Yesterday our headquarters met with Ella Pamfilova, the head of the Central Election Commission. A great deal of the discussion focused on the situation in Kemerovo Region. Among Russia’s non-North Caucasus regions, this is the one with the highest level of election fraud. In the last presidential election, turnout there was 79%, and Putin received 77% of the vote. In neighboring Novosibirsk Region, by contrast, turnout was 63% and Putin’s result was 56%.
The fraud there is total. And accordingly, the campaign against our election-monitoring headquarters is total as well. Our coordinator Kseniya Pakhomova flew in specifically for the meeting to describe what is happening in Kemerovo. During searches there, they are even confiscating the observer credentials we have already issued. We have long grown used to the police constantly detaining her in Kemerovo Region itself, but yesterday she was detained even at a Moscow airport. They searched her there as well.
So we told Pamfilova all of this, and she clucked sympathetically. She said she would send a letter to the regional police department and state that confiscating the observer credentials was unlawful.
You can watch the recording of the meeting. Ella Alexandrovna said about 146 times how ready she was to help election monitoring.
And this morning, our Kemerovo headquarters was searched yet again, for reasons that are entirely unclear.
They are confiscating equipment and documents. They are physically preventing a lawyer from entering the premises.
On top of that, it was announced today that they will revoke the documents of a representative of YABLOKO (a Russian liberal political party) who had been supplying us with observer credentials. We gave Pamfilova his name yesterday as well.
As I understand it, yesterday the Central Election Commission delegation realized that a serious monitoring campaign is genuinely being organized in Kemerovo Region and that we are going to expose their fake percentages. So they passed the necessary information to the local crooks, who then rushed to confiscate whatever had not yet been seized and to intimidate the local YABLOKO so that they would withdraw their authorized representatives.
Many thanks, dear Ella Alexandrovna, for your help with election monitoring. It all worked out wonderfully.
Despite all these problems, we will continue our work in the region. The main thing we have is our outstanding observers. We hope YABLOKO will not buckle either and will not withdraw its authorized representatives.
P.S. Also: the police have now shown up at headquarters in Krasnoyarsk, Yakutsk, and Saratov. Everywhere, they are trying to disrupt the issuance of observer credentials.