We’ve been launching websites and online services for quite a long time and quite often, so we were both delighted and surprised when we saw the stats for our new and most important project, Smart Voting 2019.vote.
Total views — 409,090 Unique users — 95,993 Completed the form — 33,227 Confirmed their email — 25,645
Since launch—and it hasn’t even been 24 hours yet—the site has been visited by more than 92,865 unique users. That’s a big number, but for us it’s fairly normal. 33,000 registrations in a single day is a lot. Even on the day the presidential campaign launched, only 14,799 supporters registered.
But what really surprised us was the conversion rate: 33% of the people who come to the site join us and complete our very long data collection form all the way through. And 27% of site visitors have filled out the form and already confirmed their email address (this is despite technical problems with Mail.ru—at the moment, Mail.ru technically is not allowing us to send emails to its users, but we’re working on it). These are fantastically high conversion figures. We’ve never seen anything like this in any of our projects in the entire history of the Foundation.
This shows that people want to take part in the political struggle, and they are eager to hand **United Russia** a defeat on its own turf. Let’s admit it: elections, in their current form, are very much that party’s playing field.
If we vote smart, there is a chance to change everything.
Of course, there have been a huge number of questions, doubts, and objections. That’s exactly how it should be. Over the next few months, I’ll devote myself to answering all of those questions patiently.
Today at 20:00, I’ll be doing a live broadcast, and I’ll be answering questions there as well.
For now, here is my response to Ilya Yashin, who supported the idea and joined the campaign but voiced the most common doubt. This is by far the question we hear most often:
Our campaign is about real life. And the reality is that EVERYWHERE—from the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament) to the district council of some remote village—United Russia holds between 70% and 100%.
Decent parties are denied registration. Decent candidates are kept off the ballot. So let’s at least start with the first step: let’s try to strip United Russia of its majority in places where it is objectively supported by only a minority of the population. Even if that means doing it through the cowardly “systemic opposition” (the officially tolerated opposition parties). You’ll see: once it starts getting more votes, it will quickly stop being quite so cowardly.
Sign up and invite your friends: 2019.vote