CEC IS NOT A WIZARD

Abstract

(By Yelizaveta Antonova. RBC Daily, April 20, 2016, p. 4. Condensed text:). .. Four of the five members of Aleksei Navalny’s Anticorruption Fund running in village council elections in Barvikha announced on Tuesday [April 17] that they were dropping out of the race in protest of the work of electoral commissions. . . . ... The oppositionists were outraged by early voting in the rural settlement, which began on April 16. ... By Tuesday evening, it was reported that 241 people from among approximately 3,000 [eligible] voters had voted early in Barvikha’s second district, Leonid Volkov, the oppositionists’ campaign chief, told RBC. Candidates predicted that voter turnout in the election would be 28%, i.e., 840 people. Thus, the 241 voters constitute about 28% of the potential electorate in the upcoming elections, and this percentage will grow by Saturday, Volkov predicts (early voting will continue through April 23). ... There is no point in participating in the elections if already 30% of the votes have been falsified before election day, Navalny wrote in his blog, assessing the scale of the alleged violations. . . . ... Uneducated boys who don’t know the law very well went overboard, Central Electoral Commission Chairwoman Ella Pamfilova responded on the radio station Govorit Moskva [Moscow Speaking]. ... The elections in Barvikha were the first for the new head of the CEC, Ella Pamfilova, who replaced Vladimir Churov in early March [see Current Digest, Vol. 68, No. 13, pp. 10 - 12]. ... In announcing the Anticorruption Fund candidates for the Barvikha village council elections, Navalny explained that they were needed to test the CEC’s new staff. Barvikha, Navalny explained, is an ideal platform for a trial election campaign: The village is near Moscow, high-profile people live there, and only 10 signatures need to be collected to run in the elections. ... From the start of early voting, the oppositionists complained that dozens of people who were all registered at the address of United Russia candidate Yelena Zhdanova showed up at the polls. In their complaint filed with the CEC, [the oppositionists] cited free rides for voters to polling stations, bribes in the form of property rights offers and the inclusion of voters from rubber apartments1 on voter lists without applications - in other words, in violation of the established order. ... Pamfilova agreed to meet with the oppositionists on Monday, April 18, to hear their complaints. Navalny’s supporters were dissatisfied with the outcome of the meeting. . . . ... This was the most pointless two hours and 15 minutes of the entire campaign. was as if we had gone to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s direct call-in show, Georgy Alburov, a member of the central council of Navalny’s unregistered Party of Progress, commented about the results of the meeting. ... The oppositionists do not have a very good understanding of the CEC’s capabilities and demanded immediate reprisals, Pamfilova complained following the meeting with the oppositionists in a conversation with RBC. I can’t be a substitute for either the [Russian] Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office, she explained. ... The organizing commission for these elections is not the CEC but the municipal electoral commission, so the CEC really can’t promptly intervene in these elections, comments Andrei Buzin, head of the election monitoring division of the Golos [voter rights] movement. The CEC can only revoke an unlawful decision of a lower-level electoral commission - at the provincial level. [That commission,] in turn, can revoke the decision of a municipal commission.. . . ... The CEC could also launch a major investigation into the allegations of irregularities. Under previous electoral commission heads, there were instances when the CEC got involved in municipal elections. For example, in 2012, a CEC special commission looked into complaints of falsifications during the Astrakhan mayoral election, following which A Just Russia candidate Oleg Shein announced a hunger strike [see Current Digest, Vol. 64, No. 15, p. 9]. The commission confirmed that there were isolated violations, but the election results were not revised. ... It is another matter that Russia has about 30,000 municipalities like Barvikha, and the CEC cannot and will not pay attention to every single one, and it doesn’t want to create such a precedent, Buzin said. . . . ... 1[The term rubber refers to apartments where many people are fictitiously registered, or where many people, usually migrant workers, live in oftentimes squalid, overcrowded conditions. - Trans.]