Utopia. It’s impossible; stop spouting this naive nonsense and childish babble. It’s impossible — listen to us, the “political professionals”; we’ve been in politics since 1989. It can’t be done without the backing of one of the oligarchic groups. It can’t be done without support from the authorities, even if covert. You’ll never have enough money for it. You won’t have the strength to overcome the furious resistance of the “systemic party opposition.” No one will agree to run as a candidate in such an election. Everyone will be afraid to take part as voters in such an election. It’s impossible because no one wants uncontrolled elections — not even the opposition. It’s impossible because we’ve always done things differently and we’re used to doing them that way. How many times have we heard all this. Every time the conversation turned to the fact that the opposition is weak precisely because it itself despises the idea of elections and competition; forces claiming to wage a real struggle against the Kremlin kleptocracy need to rely directly on the people who support them, rather than on puppet congresses of 40 to 100 people; we need internal elections (primaries, or call them whatever you like) every single time we heard a million and one very skeptical, very authoritative opinions saying that none of this was possible. Personally, I’ve been hearing it since April 1, 2008, when our joint programmatic article in Vedomosti (a Russian business daily), “Opposition: Let’s Hold Our Own Elections,” was published". (full text for those who don’t have a Vedomosti subscription). Then we heard skeptical opinions when Volkov and Krasheninnikov presented the book Cloud Democracy. Then we heard skeptical opinions when, at the “Last Autumn” conference, Volkov and Krasheninnikov presented the Democracy2 project. And then, apparently, we simply got tired of listening to skeptical opinions and decided to just do it all. We had to choose between fear of failure and “authoritative opinions saying that nothing is possible,” on the one hand, and tens of thousands of people demanding real democracy and competitive procedures for the opposition itself, on the other. It worked — and I congratulate everyone on that.
source 170,012 voters registered, 97,727 confirmed their identity through our, frankly speaking, rather complicated procedure, and 81,801 cast their ballots. Although, as leonwolf rightly said yesterday, we did not manage to set a world record in verified online voting — that still belongs to Estonia, where 120,000 people voted online in parliamentary elections — we clearly did set a record for internet voting conducted under conditions of active government interference. After all, in Estonia these were official elections organized by the state. In our case, that same state did everything it could to sabotage the vote. I congratulate everyone on this success and thank all those who supported this idea and believed it could be done. Everyone who believes in the value of their vote and wants to determine their own fate. Congratulations on the success to our CEC, and of course personally to Leonid Volkov, who proved himself an absolute monster. I also congratulate and thank all the volunteers who got this huge machine moving: those who organized the electoral committees, built the voting system, repelled attacks, made videos, organized debates, staffed polling stations, promoted the idea, and so on and so on. Just imagine it: tens of thousands of people voting across the country (Moscow accounted for only 34%), thousands making bank transfers, thousands scanning their passports, hundreds processing applications and organizing polling stations nationwide, hundreds of candidates going through public debates. All of this happened with absolutely no outside funding, relying solely on the resources of the system itself and on volunteers. This is, in fact, the largest project carried out without state participation in modern Russian history. Personally, I believe voter registration should continue, and the system of general voting should be used more often.
(photos from yesterday’s discussion of the results on TV Rain (Dozhd, an independent Russian TV channel)) Full voting results are here. Thank you to everyone who supported me. I am proud of every single vote. Every vote is both trust and responsibility, and I feel both. Thank you very much. I won’t let you down. There is a lot of work ahead. Update: Photographer Sergei Ponomarev was at both the Kremlin and the discussion of the election results yesterday. Here are his photos: