I'm not too lazy to write this post right now, in the middle of the night. You couldn't find a better example of what the future of elections in Russia looks like.
Basically, it hardly even matters that they started shaving votes off the “5 Steps” petition on ROI (the Russian Public Initiative state petition platform). The Kremlin apparently decided it was crucial that we not reach the required 100,000 verified votes right during my live broadcast. There were 103,000 viewers watching simultaneously, so hitting the needed 100,000 was guaranteed.
So on ROI they simply started deducting votes and blocked most users from being able to vote.
But it's a pointless exercise: there, so many people are going to vote that the only way to stop us from reaching the required 100,000 in the near future is to shut down ROI's state petition system altogether.
But I want to draw your attention to something very, very important.
You know that the law on electronic voting has been passed. You've been reading the near-fainting posts from members of the election monitoring community.
And everyone is worried about the same question: are they really just going to blatantly rig electronic voting? And how brazenly?
Well, the answer is right in front of us.
Voting on ROI goes through Gosuslugi (Russia's government services portal), exactly the same way voting in the elections will.
ROI is run by a vile crook named Ilya Massukh. We've caught him before falsifying things.
And—you'll laugh—the very same Massukh heads the headquarters for monitoring voting in Moscow.
In other words, right now, some creep appointed as an observer ON BEHALF OF THE PUBLIC is, in real time, stealing votes cast through Gosuslugi. Just like in an actual election.
And if we're answering the question, “How brazen are they prepared to be about it?”—this part is downright absurd.
Programmer Ivan Shukshin noticed that in the morning, the ROI website was using the correct Russian plural forms for “votes,” and then it stopped.
At first I didn't even understand what that meant, but then Leonid Volkov explained it to me:
In the numeric field, they started displaying not the <number of votes> but the <properly adjusted number of votes>, while they forgot to fix the text field, so its value is still being calculated from the real number of votes.
In other words, the declension logic is inflecting the word for “votes” according to the correct number, while the numeral they're inserting is a different, fake one.
And once again: this is being done right now by the HEAD of the public election monitoring headquarters.
We've got some interesting elections ahead of us.