Dear everyone, no matter how busy you are, I’m sure you can spare 3 minutes and 15 seconds to listen to me.
I knew the most difficult day would not be March 18, but March 19, when everyone would start “making sense of the results” and tearing their hair out. That’s why I said this in advance, and I want you to listen again now.
You look at social media, and you’d think we hadn’t been reporting these results EVERY WEEK in our polling.
Here is the latest one. Amazing work by our polling team and the volunteers who help them.
From the moment I was denied registration, I said every day: Putin would get more than 70%. Watch my broadcast on Echo. “Putin will get between 73 and 76 percent.” Those invited to play the role of the “liberal opposition” would get vanishingly small percentages—everyone said this, and everyone knew it.
Did the boycott work?
Well, of course it did—obviously. It worked to the same extent as the 2011 campaign “vote for any party except United Russia.” Back then, we pushed its result below 50 percent, and the authorities had to rig the election to keep their majority.
This time, we were driving turnout down, and of course we brought it below the level of the previous election. And once again, the authorities had to falsify the numbers to push it above 55 percent—the figure recorded by our election-monitoring headquarters. And let me remind you, we had more than 33,000 observers.
As for how they rigged it—you can see for yourselves the many videos of ballot stuffing. YouTube is full of them. Soon there will be plenty of mathematical proof as well, but even now you can take a look here. Or here.
Therefore:
Turnout was lower this time, despite the authorities’ unprecedented efforts.
Fewer people voted for Putin this time.
No matter how much the Kremlin says, “This time the order was to hold an honest election without violations,” they simply cannot allow that. Even when they handpicked the candidates themselves, they still cannot.
Stop living and thinking according to their script, which goes like this: “The size of the opposition in Russia is whatever Sobchak plus Yavlinsky received.”
These “elections” are just one episode in the struggle. We understood this was how it would be, and we focused on building an organization. And we built it, despite tremendous pressure. It is we who have grown stronger over the past year—not Putin.