Drills: Preparing for Battle

Hi, this is Navalny, and I’m announcing a drill.

[applause]

So, exactly one week from now, next

Sunday, you and I will have

an important battle against the party of power.

We have no right to let United Russia

seize as many deputy seats

as they took in the last elections. As

Suvorov (the famed Russian military commander) said: hard in training, easy in

battle. Our main weapon

is Smart Voting. It’s not a simple thing; we

have to be able to give you recommendations for

44 votes that will take place in 23

regions of the country. That means you

send us your home address, and we

reply with the candidate’s name and the addresses

of your polling stations. But first of all,

a lot can go wrong in a system like this.

It can break.

Second, in our country there is always a mess with

databases and addresses.

For example, in the address database of the

election commission in the city of

Volgograd, there are four Lenin Avenues

instead of one.

In real life there is just one avenue, but in the database

it’s four different entries, and the houses with

their polling stations are simply

scattered among them more or less at random. We

have to assemble all of this manually, and

the country is huge, so there are almost certainly

some mistakes on our side, and you will

help us find them. Third, we have no

doubt that the Kremlin will do everything it can to

block Smart Voting resources on voting day.

For you, we have

a website and a Telegram bot. What do you need to do?

Take your computer—or your phone.

Go to the Smart Voting website,

enter your address—here’s mine, for example:

175 Lyublinskaya Street. Click, and here is

my candidate:

Winnie-the-Pooh, and the polling station is located in

the neighboring school. Why Winnie-the-Pooh? Because

this is a drill. If we publish the real

name now, United Russia

will simply have time to remove all these people from

the ballot. So for now, let them deal

with Winnie-the-Pooh—or whoever it is in

your case. Now suppose the website does get

blocked.

Maybe, I don’t know, Putin

personally gnawed through an undersea cable to make it happen.

For that, we made Telegram bots; the link

is in the description. Let’s try Telegram.

Open Telegram, launch the bot. The bot

asks for an address. I type in Lyublinskaya

175. It asks again: your address is, city

Moscow, Lyublinskaya Street, 175. I tell it

yes, and it tells me: please note, your

candidate is Winnie-the-Pooh—the same one.

The address of your polling station

is such-and-such. So in my case, everything

works perfectly. But it needs to

work for everyone. Our drill consists

in everyone checking

whether their address works, whether everything is fine, whether everything

is clear. If it doesn’t work, please write

to this email. If everything

is fine, then you should post on your

social media and tell your friends that your

candidate is, for now, Winnie-the-Pooh—or whoever you’ve got

there.

But the main thing is that the Smart Voting system

is working properly, and recommend it

to others. It’s important to us that you spread the link around and that

there be lots of visits to the site right now

to test how resilient it is.

Besides what I’ve already said, everyone who

registered in advance has the most

reliable way to stay in touch: they will receive emails

with the names. So if you want

146 percent reliability (a reference to the sarcastic Russian expression about implausibly inflated election results), then

register.

On September 8, United Russia and all its

thieving deputies will once again come to

take deputy seats and declare that

they rule

in our name. The only thing that can stand against them

is Smart Voting.

Be sure to take part in these drills.

You have to test your weapon

before battle. Subscribe to our channel—

this is where the truth is told.