Have you read the statement by Pamfilova and the Central Election Commission about what is happening in St. Petersburg?
It reads like an open letter from a very irritated opposition party, not from the body Putin uses to manipulate elections.
And that is because St. Petersburg shows us that what Putin created in Russia is not a “vertical of power” and order, but simply chaos, where some petty bureaucrat, whenever his personal interests are at stake, tells that whole so-called power vertical to go to hell. The entire security apparatus and so on. And he gets away with it quite successfully.
The elections were on Sunday. But in St. Petersburg they are still counting and recounting ballots. And with every recount, more and more independent candidates move from first place to last, while relatives of local officials move the other way—from last place to first.
Everyone keeps asking me: give us the numbers—how did “Smart Voting” perform in St. Petersburg?
For Moscow, the numbers have been calculated already: this many candidates ran, this many were elected, this many seats were stolen.
But for St. Petersburg, I cannot say that, and neither can anyone else. It is completely fucking unclear what is going on there. It is not just unclear from Moscow—it is unclear even from inside the city.
Listen to this epic conversation between the chair of a precinct election commission and a higher-level commission:
By now it is more or less clear that this whole trash fire was not orchestrated by the federal center. On the contrary, the center is trying to hush it up and restore at least some distant semblance of legality. And it is not even Beglov either. It would suit him to put an end to all this too.
But they cannot. Neither Putin, nor Pamfilova, nor Beglov can defeat all these local creeps like Smakotin.
What is happening in St. Petersburg overall? Municipal budgets are fairly substantial, though not on Moscow’s scale. A local crook takes over a municipality and channels the budget to friends and relatives. Those same friends and relatives then get “elected” as deputies. That lets them form the election commission themselves. Part of the money goes to keeping the local police on side.
Local elections are handled by the local election commission. First, it refuses to register candidates. You can beat them in court in the city. Or get a ruling from the city commission in your favor. And they still will not comply.
If you do manage to get registered, you can win—the whole district hates these crooks. But they will simply keep announcing recounts until the result says their team won.
It sounds like an exaggeration, but this is still happening all across the city. They are stealing our seats, stealing Yabloko’s seats (Yabloko is a liberal opposition party). They are stealing any seats they can, without any limits, to push through their own teams of grifters feeding off the budget.
A perfect example is the Yekateringofsky district in the Admiralteysky district.
Two electoral districts—No. 11 and No. 12. Five seats in each. Four polling stations in each.
During the day, while voting was underway, two observers from the Caucasus appeared at every polling station on behalf of candidates employed by the municipality. They did not monitor the voting, but interfered with the work of our candidates’ observers, obstructed the candidates themselves, and provoked conflicts. They stayed after the polls closed as well, preventing people from documenting the commissions’ actions, but left at midnight—apparently their paid time was up.
During the vote count at a number of polling stations, the chairs did not show anyone the ballots with voters’ marks, so in some cases it is impossible to say reliably how many votes were actually on the ballots. At one polling station, observers caught the chair deliberately skipping over candidate Shurshev’s ballots about 15 times, even though he ultimately received 120 votes there.
At almost all polling stations, the vote count was interrupted: after counting the gubernatorial ballots, the chairs left with them to report to higher-level commissions, and only after they returned did the counting continue.
During the day on September 9, according to the protocols for District No. 12, we had three candidates winning seats. But one polling station had not been counted. At polling station No. 60, the count of the municipal ballots was interrupted for an entire day—supposedly because the quorum had dispersed. The uncounted ballots were handed over to the duty officer at the local police station, and the commission was supposed to reconvene on the evening of September 9, almost 24 hours after the polls had closed. When the commission did reconvene, it turned out that the ballots had been taken away from the polling station to an unknown location and then brought back for the counting to continue.
The ballots there had been replaced: the ones returned were flat and uncreased, unlike ballots that had actually been inside a ballot box. The ballots contained identical voter marks appearing one after another: several plus signs in a row, then several identical check marks in a row, then several circles in a row, and so on. That is impossible, because the ballots would have been mixed together in the ballot box.
The results at that polling station differ sharply from the voting results at neighboring stations—United Russia got 60% there instead of 20%.
In District No. 11, one of our candidates was winning a seat—Polina Kostyleva. By a margin of one vote. On the evening of September 9, the municipal election commission, acting on a complaint from a United Russia candidate, announced a recount at one of the polling stations. As a result of the recount, Kostyleva lost two votes—they “found” two ballots where our entire slate had been marked and a sixth mark had been added. At the same time, United Russia candidates gained 20 to 30 votes each.
As a result, only United Russia candidates got in.
There is no less lawlessness in Lisiy Nos—a settlement within the city. There, in District 3, after three recounts, two candidates endorsed by Smart Voting were winning seats, but after the fourth recount it turned out they were not. The whole settlement knows about this situation, and a public gathering is planned there this evening.
Here you can see the commission chair simply stealing ballots and running away:
The level of lawlessness is absolute. And nobody can do anything about it.
There is no vertical of power. There is chaos, ruled by petty officials. They do whatever they please.
This video perfectly captures the remarkable atmosphere of the elections in St. Petersburg. Watch it to the end. The policewoman with the medal is especially something: