The Chief Crook and Thief, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin the Promise-Maker, wants to become president once again—and to do it in the very first round of the strange procedure he calls an "election." But even taking into account that he only allowed onto the "ballot" people he isn’t afraid to compete against, pulling it off in the first round will still be a bit difficult: dear Russians don’t want to vote. They don’t believe him. They don’t want to listen to another report on all the great work he’s supposedly done.
And of course, Promise-Maker will be helped here by his good friend—the wizard from Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC), who will once again steal our votes by drawing in his favorite 146% wherever needed. They steal our votes; we have to defend them. They’re ours, after all—those votes. Let’s all become election observers. It’s fun and won’t take much time. You spend far more than that every month reading your little LiveJournal anyway. There are lots of excellent projects organizing election monitoring, and we support all of them, but my colleagues and I decided to launch our own additional one. This is less about election monitoring in general and more about catching crooks where we know for sure they are. The idea is simple: we pick exactly those polling stations where obvious falsifications took place in previous elections. And we assign two observers to each such station. Three, if possible. Plus mobile teams. Plus lawyers in those teams.
Let me present our website: http://rosvybory.org/ (many thanks to Georgy Alburov, Ruslan Leviev, and Egor Fyodorov) There’s still a lot to finish on the site, and we will finish it—don’t nitpick for now—let me explain how it works: You live in Moscow and want to be an observer. Let’s say you live at 4 Pereyaslavsky Lane. You register on the site, and it automatically shows you the polling stations closest to your home where there was clear and obvious fraud.
The stations with fraud were identified by one wonderful volunteer using purely statistical methods. I don’t know the details myself—maybe some correlations, maybe Gaussian curves, maybe Lobachevsky biology—I can’t explain it. The main thing is that in the end we have a list of Moscow precinct election commissions (UIKs) broken down by risk zones: where things were normal, where things look suspicious, and where they cheated. We’ll try to do the same for some other regions too. Which ones? That’s the question. As a technical benchmark, we’ve set ourselves a goal of 20,000 observers. 10,000 in Moscow, 10,000 across the rest of Russia. We need to fully "cover" Moscow and St. Petersburg. I’m sure we can do that. We understand that with leonwolf’s help we’ll "cover" Yekaterinburg. A group has suddenly and unexpectedly appeared in Ufa; we expect to cover 300 polling stations there. We’re preparing a group in Kazan. There’s this imbalance: in regions with lots of excellent activists (Yekaterinburg), there was little fraud. But mass observation is needed in cities like Saransk, where the Crooks and Thieves got 99%. In fact, that same leonwolf has already talked 30 people into going to observe in Saransk. And of course, we’ll also actively look for people in Saransk itself. Apparently we need some kind of project in one of the North Caucasus republics: surely there must be decent people there who don’t agree with all these fake 99.99999% results. What other roles are there in our game? You can register as: observer (obvious enough) lawyer — provides rapid legal assistance to observers mobile team member (without a car) — helps fight carousel voting, and if necessary replaces an observer mobile team member (with a car) What needs to be done right now: 1. (most importantly) Register on our website 2. Join the community on Facebook or VKontakte 3. You can also follow the project on Twitter. 4. If you feel up to coordinating the project in your city, you can create the relevant FB/VK groups to coordinate people and contact Georgy Alburov by email at rosvybory @ gmail.com We’re sorting out various legal issues related to observer paperwork. The situation became more complicated after Yavlinsky was removed from the ballot, but we’ll still get everyone accredited. Naturally, we’ll coordinate as much as possible with Golos (an independent election-monitoring movement), Citizen Observer, the Democratic Choice project, all party-based election monitoring projects, and so on. The tasks are shared, so we need to avoid duplicating work. Join us, my dears. Sign up to be observers. Or else don’t complain later that the Crooks and Thieves took your vote without a fight. Please share this post and the link to the website: http://rosvybory.org/