My friends, I’d like you to take a look at this chart:
It comes from a post I wrote five years ago. And in September 2019, we’ll be drawing exactly the same one, because Sobyanin is pulling exactly the same trick again—only now on an even larger scale.
Moscow has elections in September. To become a candidate, you either have to run with a “systemic party” (United Russia, the Communist Party, A Just Russia, or the LDPR), or run as an “independent” and collect 5,000–6,000 voter signatures.
Accordingly, the entire opposition—except for the Communist Party and A Just Russia—is effectively running as independents. Whether someone is from Yabloko or not no longer matters. Candidates from small parties also have to collect signatures.
The remarkable fact (which I discussed in detail on my program yesterday) is that it’s not just the opposition going through the signature process, but all of United Russia as well. They understand that under their party’s own label, they can expect nothing but rotten tomatoes, so they’ve rebranded themselves as “independents.” Even Andrei Metelsky, the leading deputy in the Moscow City Duma and head of Moscow’s United Russia branch, is also an “independent.” He’s keeping his distance from his own party.
Here’s the problem: collecting signatures in Moscow is fairly difficult. It’s professional work, and it pays decently—300 rubles per signature. It’s summer, people are away. In Moscow, people don’t open their doors. Apartment buildings have intercom entry systems.
How do the authorities solve this problem? Moscow City Hall has to gather signatures both for United Russia “independents” and for all sorts of spoiler crooks they put forward to turn the election into a circus, or to use them to attack their opponents.
Very simply: they register their own candidates using forged signatures. I think that in many cases there are no signatures there at all.
That is exactly what the chart above proves. The red vertical line is the cutoff point. If a candidate collected 5,000 signatures in support of their candidacy, it is unlikely that they would receive fewer votes than that in the election.
And yet in the last election, only 13 out of 41 “independents” received more than 5,000 votes. Some of them “collected” five thousand signatures and then got only 700 votes.
So City Hall accepted obviously fake signatures, while at the same time blocking all genuinely independent and strong candidates from the ballot. That is precisely why United Russia holds 84% of the seats in the Moscow parliament.
Of course, this is not happening only in Moscow. This is exactly how they are fabricating signatures right now for the crook Beglov in St. Petersburg. This lying thief is one of the founders of United Russia, but he is running as an independent, and the signature collection for him looks like this:
They register stooges and simply weak, pathetic candidates without any real signature collection at all. Look at the chart for the Yabloko candidates. They were all registered on the basis of fake paperwork, and only 10 out of 44 candidates ended up with more than 5,000 votes.
Now, as for why help is needed: because truly independent candidates have to work themselves to the bone right now to collect real, genuine signatures under that stupid, idiotic, prohibitive procedure written into the law.
What they urgently need right now are signature gatherers—the very people who want both to help and to earn some money. You’ll need to go through training, then go out into the field and collect signatures. The pay is 300 rubles per signature.
Collect 20 signatures a day—which is absolutely realistic—and you’ll earn 6,000 rubles.
Right now I’m asking you to help Ivan Zhdanov specifically. You know him very well: he is the director of the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation), an excellent lawyer, battle-tested. He would make an ideal deputy.
Zhdanov is running in the Voykovsky, Koptevo, Airport, and Sokol districts. If you live there, be sure to sign for him. How to do that is explained here.
If you want to help and work for Ivan and our whole team, come to Ivan’s campaign office: Avtozavodskaya metro station, 19 Leninskaya Sloboda, 1st floor. We’ll teach you how to collect signatures.
Phone number: +7-(977)-929-07-03 team@izhdanov.ru
You can see it for yourselves from social media and from what is actually happening on the streets. Many dozens of candidates are running, but only a handful are genuinely collecting signatures. For the most part, these are all relaxed, comfortable people whom Sobyanin will register anyway—they are in collusion with United Russia and are running in order to help it keep its majority.
Help the honest ones. Help those who are doing the work. Help those who are fighting right now for registration and victory, so that later they can fight for your interests as deputies.