There was once a girl growing up in a single-parent family in the Moscow suburbs.
She wanted to make something of herself, so she studied hard. Without connections or money, she got into the law faculty at Moscow State University entirely on her own.
She later graduated with honors.
After graduating, she asked herself what the right path was: to go earn money, or to try to make the world around her better?
She decided to go and improve the world—there was so much injustice all around.
She sent her résumé to an anti-corruption NGO and was hired.
She worked there for several years. She helped stop corrupt procurement contracts worth several billion rubles. She conducted investigations that hundreds of thousands of people learned about.
She got married and had a child.
She decided she had the knowledge and qualities needed to represent people in a regional legislative body. In 2014, she ran for the Moscow City Duma, but she lacked the experience and money and could not overcome the prohibitive signature threshold. She chose not to submit the signatures and instead prepared for the future, strengthening her skills and her team.
She continued her investigative work and became fairly well known.
She decided to try something new and took over a YouTube channel. It now has nearly a million subscribers, and every episode of her personal daily program gets at least 150,000 views.
When the next Moscow City Duma elections came around, she ran again. This time, with experience and an excellent team, she collected the required number of signatures relatively easily. Interestingly, she was the only candidate in her district who actually gathered signatures for real. Her supporters even uncovered an entire operation where signatures were being fabricated for the other candidates.
And now she is being told: your signatures are invalid and fake.
“But why are they fake?!” our candidate asks in despair.
Because the commission, subordinate to the very people whose corrupt activities she investigated, made them fake.
How exactly? We can see it from the example of one of our heroine’s colleagues. You do know that a passport number consists of 10 digits, right?
The commission re-enters the data from the signature sheets into a special spreadsheet so that a database can then check it automatically.
And the operator types in the voter’s passport number from the sheet—but adds one extra zero. The passport number now has 11 digits, and the database says: forged signature.
And this happens several hundred times over. Here is a detailed breakdown involving another candidate.
In other words, false evidence is being planted on these candidates in exactly the same way drugs were recently planted on a journalist.
And our heroine goes on a hunger strike.
And a volunteer from her campaign headquarters went on hunger strike with her. He collected those signatures himself and is not prepared to silently accept that the honest fruits of his labor have been declared fake.
She did everything right. She did everything honestly. All she is fighting for is the right to keep fighting in a contest that is knowingly unfair against the government-backed candidate—to take part in the election.
Should people fight for candidates like her? Everyone decides that for themselves.
But I will say this: it is not only she who has been treated as a second-class candidate, as someone whose legal rights do not apply. The six thousand people who signed for her have also been treated as second-class citizens.
As we already know, about 20 candidates have now been removed from the election. The mayor’s office is effectively making an official statement: the hundred thousand people who signed for them are second-class citizens.
The hundreds of thousands who were planning to vote for them are second-class citizens too.
How long are you prepared to remain a second-class citizen?