This is a very good moment. We’d be foolish to miss it. We need to act right now, and it’s perfectly clear what needs to be done.
A signature. Take your signature to a decent candidate right now, without delay.
You can see it for yourselves: Sobyanin and his people are back to their old tricks. Independent candidates are having their signature drives disrupted by outright force. The police are constantly trying to interfere. Fake signature collectors have been caught and filmed by the campaign teams of Yashin, Sobol, and Yankauskas.
And it’s already clear what the crooks in City Hall and the Moscow City Election Commission will do: they will block real candidates who are collecting genuine signatures. And at the same time, they will register their own frauds and spoiler candidates on the basis of completely fake signatures. This is not a guess — it’s a fact. Take a look at my long post about the last Moscow City Duma elections — I explain in detail how candidates who had supposedly “collected” several thousand signatures were allowed onto the ballot (while all the legitimate candidates were removed), and in the end they received FEWER votes than the number of signatures they had supposedly gathered in support of their candidacies.
We are seeing exactly the same thing now. Who is flooding social media with cries of “bring me your signatures quickly”? Who is looking for signature collectors? Who is paying those collectors big money?
A handful of independent opposition candidates. The real opposition — people who genuinely NEED those signatures. And next to them you can see not only the relaxed candidates of United Russia, but also the “opposition” approved by City Hall — they have no reason to hurry, because they’ll be registered even if they bring in ice cream wrappers instead of signatures.
To help independent candidates — not just the “magnificent five”, but many others as well — we have set up a special signature collection center: a convenient location in the city center where you can come regardless of where you live.
Its address is: 10/7 bldg. 1 Rozhdestvensky Boulevard. It is open daily from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
If you have the time and want to earn some extra money, sign up as a signature collector with one of the candidates’ campaign teams — the pay is pretty decent. They are still looking for collectors:
Ivan Zhdanov — izhdanov.ru Lyubov Sobol — soboll.ru (+7 (977) 482-84-35) Vladimir Milov — milov2019.ru Ilya Yashin — yashin2019.org Konstantin Yankauskas — http://yankauskas2019.ru/
All polling agencies show that United Russia’s approval ratings are at a record low. The same is happening with Putin’s ratings.
The sharp and fairly aggressive mobilization of society around political issues — with people willing to turn out for unauthorized rallies — as seen most recently and most clearly in the Golunov case (the case of journalist Ivan Golunov), shows that no one trusts the authorities or expects reasonable compromises from them.
And our task is simple: to turn these conditions into a practical result — reducing the number of United Russia deputies in every elected body. In fact, the ruling party itself has already declared that it is withdrawing from direct competition.
Officially, United Russia is not nominating any candidates in Moscow. Just think about it: even Andrei Metelsky, the longtime, entrenched leader of United Russia in the capital, is running as an “independent.”
We have seen before that candidates from the party of power were embarrassed by the United Russia brand, but now this is a genuinely sensational and politically underestimated fact. Vladimir Putin’s party, which supports all of his initiatives, is not taking part in elections in the country’s main city.
Of course, this is all a sham, and Metelsky himself said that they are all running as “independents” but will later form a United Russia faction. Even so, let’s make use of this moment.
In September, the Moscow City Duma will be elected. This is the body that plans and approves the city budget of 2.5 trillion rubles — an astronomical sum extracted from our impoverished and declining country.
And do you know how many United Russia deputies there are out of 45 seats? Thirty-eight.
That is 84%. In fact, United Russia and the My Moscow faction are the same kind of fake “independents” from the previous convocation — chief doctors and other City Hall subordinates who vote exactly like United Russia 100% of the time.
Paradoxical, isn’t it? United Russia holds 84% of the seats, yet formally it is not running in the election.
It will be an outright catastrophe if they manage to preserve their 84% and 38 seats even now. We must do everything we can to reduce that result and break the monopoly of the “party of crooks and thieves” on decision-making in our city.
Moscow is not populated only by United Russia supporters — on the contrary, they are a minority here, so there is no way they should be getting anything like 84%.
We have run the numbers. In most districts, we can defeat the government-backed candidate if we all vote for a single opponent. More on that here. This is the main and only condition: either we all throw our support behind the person with the best chance and turn second place into first, or we go into the 135th round of the debate over whether to vote for communists or liberals — while the United Russia candidate wins in the meantime.
That is why there is “Smart Voting”: register a few days before the election, and we will tell you whom everyone should vote for. It may sound a little cheeky — “we’ll tell you whom to vote for” — but that is the harsh truth of life: years of experience show that the names on the ballot mean nothing to the overwhelming majority of voters, even politically active ones. The decision gets made at the polling station at the very last moment.
“Well, this guy’s face in the photo looks less obnoxious, so I’ll vote for him” — that is exactly how United Russia wins.
This time, don’t vote for a face — vote for the name from the Smart Voting list.
And our Signature Collection Center is the first step toward smart voting. As part of this project, we are already helping 25 candidates from different Moscow districts — a wide range of independent candidates. Their political views are not what matters most to us. What matters is that, thanks to the signatures collected through the center, some of them may be able to clear the barrier that the crooks from United Russia have erected to block registration — and then, in the fall, in September, on election day itself, we will be able to vote smartly, not while holding our noses, but gladly and proudly, for decent candidates.
The moment has come, and the conditions are favorable. Let’s make sure the Moscow City Duma has fewer than 38 United Russia deputies. And let’s finally get at least a few genuinely strong, effective deputies elected there.