In less than 48 hours since the launch of signature collection for the initiative to ban officials from buying cars costing more than 1.5 million rubles, we have collected 14,634 votes, or 14.63% of the required 100,000.
As you can see, somewhere out there on the internet, 30 actual members of United Russia (the ruling political party) were found who voted against the initiative. One good man named Dmitry Ostanin made this little thing:
The script records the number of votes every five minutes and builds a voting chart. If there are any suspicious drops, we’ll see them.
So, 14,634 people have voted.
Is that a lot or a little?
A lot, given how strict and exclusive the verification is (only through Gosuslugi, Russia’s state services portal).
Very little, considering that far more than 100,000 people saw the post and the voting link, and most likely almost all of them are ready to support it.
What does that tell us?
Only that basically nobody uses the Gosuslugi website, and so they can’t vote for us either.
The voting dynamics, by the way, raise some doubts about whether those many millions of citizens who have supposedly already used the Gosuslugi site actually exist.
Where, in what corner of the internet, do these millions live? How do we find them? What sites do they visit?
News sites? Gaming sites? Komsomolskaya Pravda or RBC? Maybe we should advertise on porn sites? Odnoklassniki, Facebook, or VKontakte?
Does anyone have any ideas about this?
In any case, the pace of collection shows that we will definitely gather 100,000 signatures. Technically, under the rules, this can be done over the course of a year; we just don’t want this whole signature drive to drag on for months.
Short campaigns lasting 3 to 5 weeks are exactly what’s needed to promote worthwhile proposals that the authorities prefer to ignore. Here they won’t be able to ignore it—Putin himself ordered that these be noticed.
So what should be done is obvious:
Spread this link everywhere you can, collecting support bit by bit from those who are actually registered on Gosuslugi. Note that there are social media sharing buttons there.
It only seems to you that you have 17 people on Facebook and there’s no point posting the link because “everyone has already seen it.” In reality, you probably have some slightly odd former classmate among your friends whom you haven’t spoken to in years, but who registered on Gosuslugi to file a tax return.
And on Odnoklassniki, your mom will turn out to have two aunties who completed registration so they could keep track of their pension savings.
Register on Gosuslugi yourselves. It will come in handy anyway and, obviously, at some point it will become mandatory.
There really are useful things there (for example, you can see your fines and debts, and submit complaints), so the time spent registering will not be wasted.
You can register either by mail (you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks) or quickly by going to your local Rostelecom office.
Be active, citizens.
Officials are not going to drag themselves out of their 6 million-ruble Mercedeses on their own:
https://www.roi.ru/poll/petition/gosudarstvennoe_upravlenie1/zapret-chinovnikam-i-sotrudnikam-kompanij-s-gosudarstvennym-munitcipalnym-uchastiem-priobetat-legkovye-avtomobili-stoimostyu-svyshe-15-millionov-rublej/