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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Rule of Law |
|---|---|
| located: | Russia |
| editor: | Igor Serebryany |
A big bookstore in the downtown Moscow area sells copies of the Russian Constitution amended as a result of the referendum. There's nothing unusual about the copies bar only one exception: the copies were printed and offered in the store months before the referendum was held on July 1.
Obviously, neither the printing house nor the bookstore possesses a time machine to peep into the future results of the popular vote. Still, no business is willing to offer any goods on the market with a chance of recalling them a few months later.
This time, the Russian society has no doubt that the results of the referendum will be those the Kremlin would like to see. Since the start of the voting on June 25, the reports have been coming that here and there a local election commission is caught redhanded rigging the ballots.
Until recently, the region notorious for the election rigging had been Chechnya where, in numerous cases, the number of ballots exceeded the number of the republic's population. On Tuesday, Chechnya's head Ramzan Kadyrov proposed to make Putin president for a lifetime. Now that "political technology" has been widely employed elsewhere in Russia.
Last week, chairperson of the Central Election Commission Ella Pamfilova happily announced the "surprisingly high" number of the citizens participating in the referendum. On Monday, in Moscow's Ramenki district, independent observers found out that the number of voters who allegedly took part in the voting exceeded the number of the district's residents nine-fold. The fact was leaked to the public by a member of the district's election commission Kirill Trofimov.
"At several polling stations, only ten people signed in the voters' registry while 400 ballots had been marked in support of the amendments. In other districts, people attending the polling stations to vote were stunned to discover that someone has already voted in their names," he revealed.
Meanwhile, a journalist from the opposition Dozhd (Rain) TV channel Pavel Lobkov held an experiment trying to cast the ballots in the different polling stations. He successfully did that. After he told about his experiment to the press, he was fined but his example proved to be contagious. Many people reported that they have managed to cast two, three, and in some cases 16 (!) ballots without being stopped.
The authorities are not going to conceal the violations of the election process. On the contrary, they readily admit them, head of the monitoring of the Golos (Voice) movement Andrei Buzin says.
"It is very comfortable for the Kremlin to admit some facts of the vote-rigging and even to punish a handful of election commission's heads, as that will be presented as a proof of 'transparency" of the referendum. This is why the threats of the observers to sue the election commissions are not dangerous for the authorities: the activists unwittingly play the role prescribed for them," he says.
Buzin adds that the falsifications are not crucial for the Kremlin to obtain the results desired because the majority of the Russian voters would support the amendments anyway.
"Positive result of the referendum will be guaranteed by the majority of the voters who didn't bother to read what they are voting for. Most of them have never read the Constitution itself. Their voting has been shaped by street billboards which present the amendments as enhancing social guarantees, strengthening family ties but never mention the possibility for President Putin to stay in power indefinitely," he explains.
"Boycotting is not the best option in that case. 'Voting by feet' simply increase the proportion of those who vote for the amendments. Thus they make it easier for the Kremlin to say that the new Constitution was supported by the overwhelming majority of the voters," Buzin says.
Even though one can't break down walls by beating your head against them, boycotting is not the best way to protest the outcome of the voting, an expert from the Independent Institute for Elections Arkady Lyubarev echoes.
"The boycott proves nothing because you can't prove that this is your way of saying "no" to the ballot-rigging. The authorities could easily fight back saying that you are just lazy or indifferent to the fate of your country", he says. "In real life, no more than 30 per cent of the citizens participate in any elections. The rest are either actually lazy, or indifferent, or they have some physical obstacles for attending the polling stations. Yes, a certain part of the 'absentees' shows their resentment by ignoring the elections. Still, their protest is painless for the authorities."
Image by klimkin
