The 2024 presidential election will take place on March 17. It is expected to be officially called around December 15. Over the following month, it will become clear who is taking part.    Voters really have only three options: 1. Refuse to recognize it and boycott it; 2. Show up and all vote for one specific candidate; 3. Show up and vote for any candidate running against Putin. Thinking about it soberly and calmly, I understand that any of these scenarios is possible. For example, the election could follow the pattern of the recent Moscow mayoral election. In other words, it would be Putin and 3–4 vague, indistinguishable candidates with little separating them. In that case, the most logical thing would be to vote for any one of the vague candidates. Against Putin, and in favor of forcing a second round. But some complete trash cannot be ruled out either. For example, the ballot contains only Putin and Kadyrov. There you go, choose. In that case, I personally would not be able to regard that as an election at all. And I would call for a boycott. And that is not impossible. It’s no coincidence that Kadyrov recently proposed leaving Putin as the only candidate. Maybe he came up with that himself, or maybe he was asked to. The most appealing—though unlikely, yet theoretically possible—scenario is that someone decent ends up on the ballot. For example (I’m fantasizing here), Roizman. He’s still in Russia and, thankfully, not in prison. In that case, I would urge people to vote for him. To turn the argument about the election from a chaotic exchange of accusations into something useful, I put together a 10-question survey.

Of course, a 20-question survey would be more precise, and there is no doubt that a better survey than mine could be made. Some of the questions are deliberately a little sharpened or framed hypothetically. It is not a perfect survey, but it is short, and for example, if I look at any politician’s answers, I will understand very clearly what their election plan is and what can—or cannot—be expected from them. Once the debaters fill it out (the site opens via VPN), everyone will understand what their real position actually is, if all the verbal nonsense is stripped away. You will be able to see what should or should not be expected from specific politicians. I also added a couple of questions about campaign tactics, because passions around that will be running high very soon. (Read the full version of the post on the navalny.com blog. The link to the survey is in Stories and in the profile bio).