You can see perfectly well what is happening with the Moscow City Duma elections.
United Russia’s approval ratings are through the floor. An independent candidate in any decent Moscow district would easily defeat a United Russia candidate, even though United Russia members are trying to disguise themselves and not a single one (!) from the party of crooks and thieves is formally running. But the disguise is poor. Everyone understands that behind every respectable-looking “Valeria Kasamara from Sobyanin’s team” stick out the disgusting United Russia ears of a crook like Metelsky.
United Russia has one last, time-tested way left in Moscow to avoid losing the election. It is called the Moscow City Election Commission. That is where the fixers sit, led by the commission’s permanent chairman Gorbunov, people who for decades have done whatever their boss required. Sobyanin, Luzhkov—it makes no difference. They kept independent candidates out of the Moscow City Duma in 2009 and 2014; they falsified the vote wholesale in December 2011—so brazenly that hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. They were also the ones who, with surgical precision, saved Sobyanin from a second round (and defeat) in the 2013 Moscow mayoral election. And now all hope is pinned on them again.
They were counting heavily on the signature threshold. Those same 3% of voter signatures. Smart people designed it specifically so that it could not be cleared—especially in Moscow, and especially in summer. But then a miracle happened (or maybe United Russia has simply become so unbearable that everyone has had enough), and many candidates did the impossible—they collected those damned signatures. No joke, they collected them heroically. We helped too, however we could, with our signature collection center and with our investigations. So what are the crooks supposed to do now?
They certainly are not going to back down without a fight. This is Sobyanin’s, Sergunina’s, Liksutov’s, Biryukov’s, Khusnullin’s, and other illustrious Moscow masters of kickbacks and graft’s worst nightmare. Yashin in the Moscow City Duma, able to file formal parliamentary inquiries; Sobol in the Moscow City Duma, able to audit how budget line items are actually being carried out; Milov in the Moscow City Duma, speaking from the podium about how that budget really ought to be spent. Perish the thought! They cannot allow that to happen!
The signatures that have been collected are only the first step toward victory, though even that came at a very high cost for independent candidates. What comes next is like a fairy tale about a brave young hero facing endless trials—another obstacle, even worse than the last one. Signature verification. That is where the Moscow City Election Commission is in its element. To give you an idea, these people once managed to invalidate 113% of a candidate’s signatures (and that was even before Churov’s famous 146%!). More than once, they have thrown out the candidate’s own signature and the signatures of the candidate’s family members. Nothing stops them. Moral limits certainly do not.
There is one thing they do not like: publicity. They prefer to work in silence. That is why, for example, they reacted so nervously to yesterday’s appeal by prominent Muscovites demanding an honest verification of signatures—they called it “pressure on the commission” and “interference in the electoral process”! Or take this: election experts from Golos (Russia’s leading independent election-monitoring movement) demanded that journalists be allowed to observe the signature verification process—they were refused as well, and in a very nervous way.
All of this is predictable and understandable. Crooks, like cockroaches, love darkness and silence. So we need to keep methodically dragging them out into the light by their filthy little tails and antennae. That is why I am very glad that Yashin, Milov, Sobol, Zhdanov, and Jankauskas wrote the following appeal to Pamfilova. No, there is not much hope for Ella Aleksandrovna. But this is a continuation of the right strategy—to shine a bright flashlight of truth into the darkest corners, where election falsifiers with 20 years of experience are hiding, and where they brazenly assure us that demanding transparent signature verification with equal conditions for all candidates amounts to “pressure on the election commission.”
Well then, let’s show them what pressure looks like.
Here is the text of the appeal. I support it and believe it should be circulated as widely as possible.
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Open letter to E.A. Pamfilova, Chair of the Central Election Commission
We demand external oversight of the Moscow City Election Commission and the signature verification process.
July 5 is the final day for collecting signatures for self-nominated candidates running for the Moscow City Duma. We, the independent candidates, have collected these signatures despite the enormous and disproportionate barrier deliberately created to keep candidates disliked by the Moscow authorities off the ballot. These signatures came at the cost of tremendous effort. We and our campaign staff collected them in heat and rain. Within artificially compressed deadlines. In a situation where our signature gatherers were attacked, intimidated, and constantly taken to the police. We collected signatures in full public view and with the help of many people. Every single one of our signatures is absolutely genuine.
Now we are prepared to do everything necessary to defend them. Behind each of us stand dozens of campaign staffers, hundreds of signature gatherers, and many thousands of voters who want to see their candidate on the ballot. We demand one simple thing: equal conditions for access to the election and a fair campaign, so that only Moscow voters—and no one else—decide the new composition of the Moscow City Duma.
But unfortunately, we know all too well what the Moscow mayor’s office and the Moscow election commission under its control are going to do. These are the same people who falsified the 2011 elections; the same people who kept every independent candidate off the ballot in 2009 and 2014. We know that if extraordinary measures are not taken, real candidates who collected signatures from real voters will not be allowed to run. Their signatures will be declared invalid, forged, improperly completed, and so on.
Fortunately for them, the falsifiers have dozens of “effective” tools in their arsenal for doing just that. Here are only some of the most popular ones, repeatedly tested to eliminate unwanted candidates in elections at all levels and in many regions, including Moscow.
1) Signatures are declared invalid en masse on the basis of the so-called “FMS database”—the Russian Interior Ministry’s passport database, which often contains unreliable and outdated information. In many cases, election commission staff or Interior Ministry employees themselves make intentional or unintentional errors when digitizing signature sheets for comparison with the FMS database, and signatures are rejected on the basis of those errors and the election commissions’ position that there are “no grounds not to trust the FMS certificate.” Although the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation ruled this practice unlawful in 2016, it continues to be widely used.
2) Signatures are declared invalid en masse on the basis of findings by “handwriting experts,” who possess the astonishing ability to compare thousands of signatures with one another in a matter of hours (that is, to make millions of pairwise comparisons) and arbitrarily declare some pairs to have been “written by the same hand.” This is how even the signatures of candidates themselves and of their family members are often thrown out. At the same time, these “experts” bear no responsibility whatsoever for the quality of their conclusions, yet challenging their correctness is impossible either before election commissions or in court.
3) Another tactic is the widespread use of “formatting and penmanship” nitpicking: we have seen signatures rejected because someone wrote “bldg.” instead of “building,” or “st.” instead of “street,” because the “tail” of a signature allegedly crossed into the neighboring box, or because the digit “1” in “2019” supposedly looked like a “7,” and so on without end. Yet the purpose of collecting signatures is not to put thousands of voters through a penmanship exam, but simply to establish the voters’ will and determine whether a candidate has sufficient support.
4) There are also numerous legal technicalities that make it possible to arbitrarily deny registration to any candidate, even if they have complied with every absurd requirement. For example, the law prohibits members of election commissions with voting rights from collecting signatures, and all signatures collected by such commission members are automatically invalidated during verification. At the same time, around one million people in Russia have this status, and candidates themselves have no tools whatsoever to check whether a signature gatherer has it or not. Opponents need only plant a few such gatherers in a candidate’s campaign, people who do not disclose this to the candidate but do report it to the election commission during signature verification, in order to have the candidate’s signatures thrown out on entirely “legal” grounds (though in reality, of course, absurd ones).
Based on the experience of past years and many election campaigns both in Moscow and in other regions, we have absolutely no reason to doubt that all of the above tools, and many others, will be used against our signatures by Moscow election commissions in the coming days. Meanwhile, “fake” candidates whose signature-gathering activity no one ever saw will be registered quickly and easily. They will submit forged signature sheets with fabricated signatures, yet they will “pass verification” without any problem. That is precisely why, in the 2014 Moscow City Duma elections, more than two-thirds (!) of the candidates registered through signatures received fewer votes than the number of signatures they had submitted.
We understand perfectly well that the Moscow mayor’s office, and Mayor Sergei Sobyanin personally, will do everything possible to keep us out of the election. The authorities fear the appearance of genuinely independent candidates in the Moscow City Duma.
We do not trust, and cannot trust, the system of Moscow election commissions. They have discredited themselves so thoroughly that no sane person can trust them. This system has repeatedly coordinated election fraud, and long ago forgot how to organize real elections.
Therefore, given the special importance and public resonance of the Moscow City Duma elections, we demand external administration of the Moscow elections by the Central Election Commission. At a minimum, the procedures for signature verification and candidate registration must take place under the full oversight of the Central Election Commission, the public, and journalists. We are not demanding special rights or privileges. We are demanding equal treatment for all candidates: — a fully public and transparent signature verification procedure, identical for all candidates, — the application of the same procedures and standards for evaluating signature sheets for all candidates, — unrestricted access for candidates, their representatives, and journalists to meetings of election commissions and their working groups conducting signature verification, — the ability for all candidates, in accordance with the law, to send their representatives to observe the verification of other candidates’ signatures.
We know that even these simple and fair demands will not be met without the intervention of the Central Election Commission. That is why we are addressing this letter to you and proposing that, in the coming days, a meeting be held to establish the rules and procedures under which signature sheets submitted in support of all candidates for the Moscow City Duma—without exception, both independent and establishment-backed—will be verified. We call on other independent candidates to join our appeal.
Ivan Zhdanov Vladimir Milov Lyubov Sobol Konstantin Jankauskas Ilya Yashin
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July 4 is the last day of operation for the Signature Collection Center in Moscow.
And if you are not in Moscow, sign up for Smart Voting.