Whew, they’re clearly preparing something for tomorrow in the city on the Neva (St. Petersburg). There’s going to be some kind of massive ballot-stuffing operation to inflate turnout, most likely at the level of the GAS Vybory electronic election system.
How else can this be explained?
This morning, Daniil Ken went to the TEC (Territorial Election Commission, where the GAS Vybory terminals are located) to submit his appointment papers.
He had been appointed as a member of that very TEC with advisory voting rights. In other words, he is a commission member who, if not able to prevent fraud, can at least detect it. And Ken is someone who understands these matters well — he is a local deputy.
At first, they refuse to accept his appointment papers.
Then, suddenly, the police arrive and detain him.
They take him straight to court. The court is, of course, open on a Saturday. There, they claim that Ken was using obscene language and waving his arms around. Yes, that sounds just like him:
12 days in jail. The Territorial Election Commission has been left without oversight.
The St. Petersburg authorities are in a panic, because we managed to cover the city quite thoroughly with election monitors, together with candidate representatives and observer organizations.
By the way, this is the answer to a frequently asked question: why are your election-monitoring headquarters being smashed up, while everyone else’s are left alone?
Because, unfortunately, there are no other headquarters. If this is happening in St. Petersburg (where there are the traditionally strong Observers of Petersburg and at least some Yabloko activists), then across the rest of the country (except Moscow, where everyone has plenty of people), no one has any observers at all.
In St. Petersburg specifically, Sobchak’s headquarters did an excellent job on election monitoring. They really did great: they issued appointment papers to everyone and coordinated their distribution. They stayed and worked as long as necessary. Everyone managed to cooperate with everyone else, even though that is often difficult in St. Petersburg. They did a great job, no question about it, and we are grateful to them.
But if you look at the situation across the country, all these parties and candidates have absolutely nothing. No people, no structures. And most importantly, no will. They have no desire to fight and protect their voters’ ballots from fraud. On the contrary, we have even encountered some extremely disturbing cases of direct assistance to the vote-riggers.
Kemerovo Region. There will definitely be fraud here. Yabloko is trying here too to revoke appointment papers already issued to our observers (so why issue them in the first place?). In both Kemerovo and Novokuznetsk, headquarters have been raided and searched.
We started bringing in observers from neighboring regions. A bus carrying observers from Tomsk was blocked at the regional border.
Krasnodar: the most populous federal subject where elections are falsified wholesale.
And this morning our lawyer was arrested.
Yesterday, our Sochi coordinator caught local crooks preparing to rig the vote.
Today he was arrested together with his wife. She allegedly “resisted the police during the search.”
In Moscow, the situation with absentee certificates is simply absurd (I recorded a video about them, and the Central Election Commission replied that it was all nonsense). At some polling stations, the number of voters has nearly doubled.
So, in short, Putin will do everything possible to herd the entire country into voting for his re-election — and those who can’t be herded will simply be fabricated on paper.
If you are an honest person, do not go to these “elections” tomorrow. And help us with monitoring and spreading information. In particular, help share this post so people know what is happening.
Tomorrow, our election-monitoring headquarters’ situation center will be operating all day, along with a hours-long live broadcast of events on the Navalny LIVE channel.