There is nothing more important right now than persuading you, wherever you live, to take part in Smart Voting. I continue to insist that this is the main thing now; everything else—from political prisoners to political lawlessness and the right to freedom of assembly—is either part of the Smart Voting strategy or organizationally complements it.
I also want to announce right away: we have launched training sessions for election observers. We will need to defend our Smart Voting. Here is a list of the upcoming training sessions. Full details are here.
Many thanks to everyone who responded in one way or another to my post. I have read a wide range of reactions, and now I will respond to the most important criticisms.
At the same time, I ask those who already understand all this to join the discussion actively. We will not achieve the goals we want through my posts alone. Especially since I am really sick of writing these posts by hand (poor schoolkids who constantly have to deal with pen and paper).
Before I start answering specific questions and points of criticism, I want to point out that not only is the Smart Voting strategy being discussed openly, but the attitude toward it from Putin’s Presidential Administration—as well as the methods for countering it—is not being hidden at all.
A Vedomosti article describes how the Presidential Administration is worried about Smart Voting and plans to push the theme of division. This is already happening: anyone paying attention will have noticed the flood of pieces from the Presidential Administration’s and City Hall’s usual media servants along the lines of “we don’t want to vote for Stalinists—boycott” and “this isn’t smart voting, it’s crazy voting, look what ridiculous candidates they are. Boycott.”
Moreover, the article states plainly what the authorities are hoping for if protest-minded citizens do show up at the polls: “...the removal of opposition candidates and the protests have increased interest both in the elections and in participating in them. It is clear that part of the protest electorate will have no one to choose from.”
In other words, the task facing City Hall and the Presidential Administration has two parts:
Make sure you do not come out to vote.
Make sure you stand in front of the information board with the candidates’ names, blinking in confusion because you do not understand whom to vote for. Even if you guess which one is the United Russia candidate (who will be labeled an “independent”), you still have to guess whether to vote for Ivanov, Petrov, or Sidorov.
You like Sidorov—he looks more respectable in the photo.
Then another protest-minded voter comes in after you. He prefers Petrov—he is wearing glasses in the photo, so he must be smarter. What happened? It seems like two people voted against United Russia. But in practice, your votes were split, and the United Russia candidate’s chances of winning only increased. And that is not all. Then yet another protest-minded voter comes in. He hates United Russia more than anyone else—that is why he came to vote—but he works a lot. He does not have time to sit on Facebook and dig deeply into election schemes. So our Very Protest-Minded Voter is quite surprised not to find a candidate from an independent party on the list, and simply puts a checkmark at random next to the name of the woman with the tall hairstyle.
As you have probably guessed, he voted for United Russia.
And only Smart Voting solves the problem of an overall strategy. In my example, at least two out of the three votes were wasted—or even did harm. But if each of those three voters, on election day, simply goes to the website or sends their home address to a chatbot in a messenger app, they will get a message: you are in such-and-such district and such-and-such polling station. Vote for Ivanov. Ivanov will get three votes and move three votes closer to defeating the “independent candidate from United Russia.”
And of course, right now you are thinking: I’m not some idiot. I can figure it out myself.
Then here is a test for you:
- Svetlana Albertovna Volovets, Director of the State Autonomous Institution “Scientific and Practical Center for Medical and Social Rehabilitation of People with Disabilities” - Vladislav Vladimirovich Zhukov, Executive Director, “National Center for Environmental and Epidemiological Safety” - Dmitry Alexandrovich Loktev, coach and instructor - Andrei Yuryevich Petrov, pensioner
Which one here is the United Russia candidate, and whom should you vote for? These are real candidates in one of the districts. If this is your district, or if you follow politics very closely, then maybe you can guess something. But 98% of people will not be able to.
Show this to an election expert, and he will say: hang on, I’ll google it and tell you.
But how many people are actually going to google it? 1%? 2%?
For everyone else, there is Smart Voting.
Smart Voting: we have already googled it all for you.”
Sorry for such a long introduction; I am moving on to the questions and criticism. If we try to arrange everything in order from the general to the specific, these are the objections I found:
1. This is not an ideal strategy. We need a plan of action that includes both consolidated voting and getting our candidates on the ballot.
Yes, of course, Smart Voting is not an ideal strategy. Obviously. Let me remind you that the political system in our country is called “electoral authoritarianism.” The word “electoral” is there to remind us that elections here are held only so that Putin can win them. And the word “authoritarianism” is there to say: guys, there are no ideal strategies.
An ideal strategy is one in which the Russia of the Future party is registered and fields candidates. The candidates win in a fair contest. No criminal cases are fabricated against me, and I, like any politician with sufficient public support, take part in the presidential election. And not in some parallel reality, but in ours, the court annulled the fraudulent home voting in the 2013 Moscow mayoral election. I won the runoff. Moscow buys paving tiles at market prices, not at ten times the cost. The budget does not hand out apartments worth tens of millions of rubles (hundreds of thousands of US dollars) to God knows whom.
No one should have to say or write, “How Moscow has blossomed under Alexei Anatolyevich,” for the ordinary work that any mayor of a major city does—especially work that is not all that difficult when you have a budget of 2.5 trillion rubles.
But you and I can only deal with real strategies, all of which assume that we will have to interact with parts of the system that always work against us.
Election commissions, courts, the media, the police—they are all against us, and they all work to ensure that only those backed by Putin and his administration are elected as deputies. Electoral authoritarianism, remember! But we have something too. A mere trifle called “the majority of voters.”
The majority of voters in Russia in 2019 do not want to vote for United Russia and its candidates. This fact, reliably established by pollsters and confirmed by United Russia itself—all of whose candidates suddenly became “independents”—gives us enormous potential.
After that, things get complicated. Protest voters are different. They cannot stand one another. They use the internet to different degrees, and each one sits in their own information bubble.
The Smart Voting strategy is the best of the real options. If you like, it consists in hacking an electoral system that serves only Putin’s interests. Unfortunately, we do not set the rules of the game; we use the system’s vulnerabilities so that it hits its creators as hard as possible over the head. A few such blows will sooner or later lead to a fairer system.
As Ivan Kurilla, a professor at the European University at St. Petersburg, quite rightly writes: the success of Smart Voting will not yet be a triumph of democracy, but it will be a breach in the current system.
Speaking of the system’s vulnerabilities, I want to point out that this is not rocket science: anyone can take the results of the previous election and shade a map of Moscow in the colors of the different political forces whose candidates came in second and third. Then add the number of votes received by the Communists, and the method of “hacking” becomes obvious. Here we need to throw an extra 6,000 votes behind one candidate so the United Russia candidate loses; there we need 10,000, but for a candidate from another party.
And this, by the way, is the answer to the question: “Why is Navalny deciding whom everyone should vote for?”
I am not deciding it. It has already been determined by the voting history of each district, the candidates’ results, their mutual support, and so on.
We are simply fitting tables and checkmarks onto the globe using what remains of the excellent list of Moscow City Duma candidates after Sobyanin, Gorbunov, and Pamfilova had their fun with it.
The same applies in all other regions except St. Petersburg, where the elections will be held in multi-member districts (don’t ask), and where Smart Voting can elect good people without taking previous election results into account. There, our candidates are a compromise and a balance among all political forces, adjusted for the lawless way candidates were kept off the ballot.
Look. For us, victory in these elections would mean: we nominated our own candidates, the candidates won, and we received the majority of votes.
Putin’s victory in these elections looks like this: 45 names were assigned to 45 districts, and those exact people became deputies. At a minimum, they took control of 85% of the seats. Then they can say: Putin’s candidates still enjoy public support and won an absolute majority in the parliament of the capital, where 10% of the country’s population lives.
That is precisely why all this shameless trash was set up: to guarantee themselves victory in exactly those terms.
Candidates are under arrest. Peaceful people have been beaten and dispersed. Hostages have been taken from among the protesters. Criminal cases have been fabricated, and raids have been carried out against the key opposition organization.
Our response must be to declare—and then show the authorities—that no, you will not win elections this way. We will not allow it. These are vile methods, and we will not watch them in silence. Even if our best candidates have been barred and jailed, we will mobilize and organize ourselves so that you do not get your list of 45 names approved by Putin’s administration either.
Our minimum goal: United Russia must win fewer seats than it has now.
Right now, out of 45 seats: 1 is vacant, 4 belong to the Communist Party, 1 to the LDPR (de facto United Russia), 1 to Rodina (de facto United Russia), and 38 to United Russia.
Our maximum goal: deprive United Russia of its majority. That means they must win fewer than 22 seats.
Is this realistic? Yes, if you make just a little effort and persuade 5 or 6 people you know to take part in Smart Voting on September 8. As I have already written: 60,000 people came out to the rally; if each of them persuades a few friends, then on September 9 we will be living in a country where Putin lost the capital—or both capitals.
He removed candidates from the ballot. He jailed them. He beat and humiliated people. He lied and falsified. But in response, people came out and voted against him and against such methods.
Let’s do it. We have to do it.
Yes, of course, afterward they may buy off a couple of deputies, intimidate others, and so on. They may add them to their faction, but the main political fact will not change: he lost. There was that very “expression of the people’s will,” and he lost.
As for the strategy of getting candidates onto the ballot, that brings me to the answer to the second question:
2. So what, does that mean the “Let Them Run” campaign is over? Have you given up?
We have neither finished nor given up, but it is already clear that Putin would sooner eat Peskov’s mustache than obey the law and restore the candidates to the ballot. Right now, we have exactly one way to secure their registration—exactly the same way as securing the immediate release of political prisoners: a rally of 300,000 people on Manezhnaya Square (a central square next to the Kremlin in Moscow).
From the very beginning, we said plainly from the stage that if candidates started being removed from the ballot, we would call on people to take to the streets. And people did come out—in numbers far greater than anyone could have imagined for an election of this level.
But the guys in the Kremlin and City Hall need 45 out of 45. As has now become clear, they are ready not only to bomb Voronezh (a Russian idiom meaning to go to absurd, self-destructive extremes), but half the country, just to prove that a “Putin majority” lives in Moscow and that they win here.
So we are certainly not dropping the demands of the Let Them Run campaign, but we are preparing for the battle in the situation as it is. If we manage to get some candidates registered, that will improve our position. But even if we do not, we still have everything we need to prove to Putin that he has stolen away, talked away, promised away, lied away, and lost in hockey his majority.
3. The strangest objection to Smart Voting that I sometimes come across is: what the hell kind of “Smart Voting” are you talking about when we need to get our people out of prison!
I have already answered that in some detail in my post about how political prisoners should be helped.
I will repeat that, apart from a huge open-ended rally demanding the immediate freedom of political prisoners, there is hardly anything more important for securing their release than Smart Voting.
In addition to a moral victory, political prisoners would finally get a city parliament demanding their release. And that, excuse me, is already more powerful than bodies like the Presidential Human Rights Council, with all due respect.
And let’s stop being hypocritical: supporting Smart Voting and campaigning for it in no way prevents anyone from taking part in the campaign to defend political prisoners. If you want to help, you will help. If you do not, you will find an excuse.
If there are people who, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on September 8, will be so busy defending political prisoners that they cannot spare even an hour, then okay. You are excused from taking part in Smart Voting.
4. Another common question comes with a sly little jab: Alexei, we found a post from 2014 where you argued very convincingly that participating in Moscow City Duma elections was useless and even immoral. And not so long ago, in the presidential election, you organized a “voters’ strike”—an active boycott. So why does your position change so often?
My position is not changing. The elections are changing, the situation in the country is changing, and the authorities’ tactics are changing.
You and I are not standing in front of a vending machine: press one button combination and you get a chocolate bar, press another and out drops a teddy bear. We are up against cunning, sophisticated, cynical people who can even rewrite the laws entirely to suit themselves.
Entire departments of the Presidential Administration spend every day searching for the strategies, tactics, and methods people use to act against injustice and the usurpers of power, and then inventing ways to counter them.
This applies to elections, rallies, information, laws, and so on. Everything.
It is foolish to expect that we can invent a universal tactic for election campaigns and apply it forever. In 2011, the campaign “Vote for any party except United Russia—the party of crooks and thieves” began with this post. It turned out to be quite effective, and for the first time during Putin’s rule, his party lost the fight for a majority. Yes, control over parliament was quickly restored through fraud (in Moscow, it triggered mass protests), bribery, and intimidation of the systemic opposition. But the political fact had occurred: Putin lost, and from that moment on, being a United Russia member was no longer so cool. And now it has become so shameful and uncomfortable that Beglov, one of the party’s founders, proudly declares during debates: I am nonpartisan.
After our success, the Kremlin began looking for ways to counter “Vote for any party except United Russia,” and it found them. By the 2012 presidential election, it no longer worked, and by 2014 it was completely dead.
The 2014 Moscow City Duma election took place in the context of the war in Ukraine, I was under house arrest, and there were no strong candidates. Everything degenerated into “let’s participate so we can talk about our ideas.” That was an utterly pathetic piece of political spin. We, however, must stand on moral and political principles: we should participate in elections in such a way, and at such times, that it creates a problem for the authorities, not solves one for them.
That is why my tactic in the Moscow City Duma election was, as that post says: if there is a good candidate who can win, vote. If not, do not vote.
Right now, we cannot elect our excellent candidates, but we absolutely can make the United Russia candidate lose in every district. That is why we need to show up everywhere, bring as many people as possible, and vote everywhere for the one candidate who has a chance—that is what Smart Voting is.
The 2018 presidential election shows us especially clearly why different elections require different tactics.
Keeping a real candidate off the ballot was combined with the idea of humiliating people with opposition views as much as possible—they were given a candidate who could illustrate the Wikipedia article “political prostitute.” And the men in the Kremlin, smirking, looked at us and said: so, you’re against Putin? Here is your candidate, go vote; on election day you will find out how few of you there are, how much your own people despise you. And we will show your candidate on TV, where he will admit defeat, call the election fair, and lament how vanishingly few people voted against Putin. And then he will go on to advertise “hydrogen water”, further proving that the opposition is a pack of idiots.
Of course, in that situation the only possible tactic was a voters’ strike.
The situation continues to change, and Putin’s disgusting, thieving, senseless scheme to raise the retirement age—which I spent all of last autumn in jail for protesting against—opens up possibilities for new tactics.
Putin has not just lost his majority; he has lost it even among those who regularly go to the polls. Governors started losing. Do you remember the hysteria and aggression after the defeat in Primorye? That was the first sign of the new level of hysteria and aggression that later erupted in Moscow.
Incidentally, in a surprising way, falling incomes and the increase in the retirement age brought the strategy “Vote for anyone except United Russia” back to life—but only in a certain type of election.
What is “anyone but Beglov”? It is the same thing as “any party except United Russia.”
But that works only in gubernatorial elections; for regional legislatures and municipal elections, it does not. There, only Smart Voting works.
For now.
I have no doubt that by the next election cycle, the Kremlin will come up with something, and we will have to adjust our actions.
In short: the time for simple solutions is over. They are cunning, and we must be smart and work around their tricks. Right now, that means Smart Voting.
5. The last major objection is this: “Navalny is telling us to vote for a Stalinist. Let’s vote instead for people who are closer to our views.”
Closely related is the argument: “We will vote for them, and then they will switch sides and start introducing terrible laws.”
Most often, these arguments come from Yabloko supporters—my former party colleagues. And this is always especially funny in the context of “people switching sides,” because many of the most fanatical and aggressive Putinists whose names everyone knows—from Yarovaya to Mizulina—are former Yabloko members.
That party is simply the leader in defectors. Does that mean everyone who voted for Yabloko is guilty of this and should regret their choice? Of course not. If the party had not been knocked out of the State Duma in 2003 and had kept its parliamentary seats, then Yarovaya would probably still be a Yabloko member. She would be speaking at party congresses and denouncing Smart Voting, because in some districts people will have to vote for Communists.
More generally, I would suggest that the people making these arguments grow up.
Today’s Communists are just as much “Stalinists” as Yabloko and SPS members were “democrats” in 2003. They are a mixed group of people looking for a place within the systemic opposition. Where they have a chance of being elected, they use us, and we use them. If we elect many of them, they will grow bolder and defend our interests better. If we elect few of them, they will sit quietly and be less help.
Ideological voting—voting for those closest to your views—makes no sense right now. Especially when it comes to Yabloko. You will simply be handing your vote to the United Russia candidate.
The last time Yabloko candidates won in a major single-member district was in 2003. Sixteen years ago, they elected one deputy. In Moscow City Duma races, they won districts even earlier, and only those who were on “Luzhkov’s list”—that is, they won through administrative resources.
Over the past 15 years, you can count on one hand the number of times they have won more than 5% in regional legislative assemblies.
In single-member races, without Smart Voting they have no prospects at all. Even their strongest candidates—at least those the party itself presents as strong—win only scraps. In the last State Duma election, Shlosberg ran in his home Pskov region, there was no fraud, and he got 5.9% and finished fifth.
All the successes Yabloko boasts about are either in multi-member districts, where victory literally requires just a couple hundred votes, or in some two villages with three voters, or—in the rarest cases—5–6% under a proportional system.
I do not want to argue with Yabloko: there are decent candidates there, and we will elect them through Smart Voting, but they, of all people, should be the first to jump for joy over this idea. For the first time in many, many years, they will be able to get their deputies elected.
How many Yabloko deputies are there in the Moscow City Duma right now? Zero.
On September 9 there will be four, if Smart Voting works. Surely you will agree that 22 United Russia deputies + 4 Yabloko deputies + 19 non–United Russia deputies of various kinds is much better than what we have now: 38 United Russia deputies + 6 non–United Russia deputies + 1 vacant seat.
So I suggest we stop listening to this grumbling, take into account the real voting results of the past 20 years, and act rationally.
We will elect Yabloko candidates as deputies, but to do that we need to stop listening to Yabloko supporters’ nonsense about how strong and popular they are.
There. I think I have covered the most important points here.
Once again, I ask you to read this, share it with people you know, and either support it publicly or criticize it publicly.
Election day is getting closer. Having weighed everything, we must choose the best strategy for action.
I maintain that today, that strategy is Smart Voting.