voting progress

29 April 2013

Just so you know, my ability to write motivational and inspiring posts has serious limits. The last post with a heart-wrenching call to vote, so that our bill banning officials from buying expensive cars would be considered by the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament), produced a decent boost in voting momentum:

You can see, by the way, that all the initiatives there, and the ROI website itself, are being promoted thanks to our campaign. The irony is rich: instead of Putin, we’re the ones carrying out his campaign promise. So here’s the thing: the voting trend after yet another post is leading many people to make bad extrapolations and harmful conclusions. The thinking goes like this: Navalny just needs to write one of these posts every week, and after four more posts we’ll get the job done—we’ll collect 100,000 signatures. I want to say that I strongly doubt it. Each new post will have less and less effect. I’m already running out of campaign words. Soon I’ll just be posting photos of yet another Mercedes that the Chechen administration is buying. And putting the words "being bought with our money" in bold italics. We’ve already used all that a hundred times, and it doesn’t work. Today, out of curiosity, I bought 20,000 rubles’ worth of Google Ads (about 20,000 RUB). And I’m going to buy the same amount on Yandex.Direct. We’ll see how it works, and if it does work, we can all chip in for advertising together. I really don’t understand this stuff at all, though, so professional help would be useful. All of that is great, but we need to be honest with ourselves: the only thing that will really help us is our own civic responsibility. It finally needs to kick in. 9 out of 10 people reading this post support the initiative and are ready to vote, but they’re too lazy, and they assume someone else will vote. The 100,000 will be reached anyway. Without me. Of course I support the movement, but I’m not going to do anything myself.

http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=600576

Volvo S80 II for 2.7 million rubles for the "Federal Agency for the Legal Protection of the Results of Intellectual Activity for Military, Special, and Dual-Purpose Use"

http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=5975703

Toyota CAMRY for 4.8 million rubles for the "Federal Highway Administration for Krasnodar Krai of the Federal Road Agency"

http://zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=6003568

And all of this is being bought with our money. Vote here.

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