As part of the continuing discussion "our strategy for the upcoming elections", I highly recommend reading Alexander Kynev’s excellent article, "The Utopia of Boycott" *The main protest electorate today is concentrated in the cities. And the party in power is specifically interested in low turnout among urban voters. The result of an election-boycott strategy is stronger representation for the country’s most patriarchal and authoritarian regimes. *Put simply, this can be reduced to the formula: “if you don’t vote, the Caucasus votes.” ... *That is precisely why it is worth stressing again and again the following point: seats are allocated in several stages. First, parties must clear the seven-percent threshold, but then the seats within party lists are distributed among the regions according to the absolute number of votes cast. As a result, a region does not know in advance exactly how many seats it will receive: the higher the turnout, the more seats it gets. For example, because of differences in the officially reported turnout in the December 2007 elections, the territorial groups of the party lists in Dagestan and Nizhny Novgorod Region received almost the same number of seats—9 and 10 deputies respectively—even though Nizhny Novgorod Region had nearly twice as many voters (2.8 million versus 1.4 million in Dagestan). Because of low turnout, major industrial centers were underrepresented in the State Duma of the Russian Federation—Moscow, St. Petersburg (meaning these territories themselves, not the candidates’ official place of residence registration), as well as other regions of the Northwestern Federal District and the Volga region (Samara and Nizhny Novgorod Regions). *In practice, for residents of many large regions who are interested in real change, the choice turns out to be surprisingly simple: even if you do not vote and wait “until the Second Coming” for the sudden arrival of wise government and fair elections, in any case regions such as Chechnya, Kabardino-Balkaria, Dagestan, and so on will still “vote” (or, more precisely, have their votes “counted correctly”) In the article, Kynev analyzes the most popular of the proposed strategies: vote for any party against the “party of crooks and thieves”; boycott the elections; vote, but deliberately spoil your ballot; take your ballot with you And he analyzes them professionally, while also untangling some very convoluted election law along the way. Give it a read—it’s interesting.
People