Electoral fraud in Russia exists, and is quite prevalent, tilting Putin’s and United Russia’s results upwards of where “they should up” by up to 10% points since the mid-2000s.
That said, Russian electoral fraud has generally not been banana republic tier for a couple of reasons:
- Electoral fraud usually happens in the counting stages, instead of the naked ballot stuffing that is often associated with fraud in the popular imagination (indeed, the latter is rather hard to do these, with cameras in the vast majority of voting stations). This fraud can generally only be detected through complicated statistical methods involving Gaussian curves and “nice fractions” that are rather beyond the comprehension of average laypersons.
- Electoral fraud generally happens at the local level, as opposed to being ordered from “on high”, as suggested by the fact that there are good correlations between electoral fraud and the level of corruption within the Russian regions). Although the incentives in play – lack of punishment for electoral fraud, rewards for regional bigwigs where United Russia and Putin get good results – strongly favor it. Nonetheless, this still distinguishes Russia from Belorussia and Central Asia, where elections the results really are written out in advance.
But these two mitigating patterns were not in display during the gubernatorial elections in Vladivostok.
At one point, the KPRF candidate Andrey Ishchenko was leading the Putin-endorsed United Russia candidate Andrey Tarasenko by 245,095 (49.9%) votes to 233,801 (47.6%), with victory assured. But when turnout reached 99.03, Tarasenko had surged to 247,396 (49.0) to the hapless Ishchenko’s 245,090 (48.6). Then one more voting station reported its results, and Tarasenko jumped up to 253,082 votes to Ishchenko’s 245,438 – even though no known electoral station in Russia has more than one thousand registered voters.
Consequences:
- Although the magnitude of this fraud is not all that high in absolute terms, it did clearly subvert the will of the Primorye region, which voted against the UR candidate.
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You need no fancy statistics, just arithmetic, to understand that this fraud was fraud. This is as blatant as the 146% turnout in Rostov oblast in the 2011 elections – except the latter genuinely was a technical mistake on the part of a single TV news channel.
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The suddenness and last minute nature of the intervention suggests that it came from on high.
I have no idea why they did it. Irkutsk oblast has been ruled by non-United Russia governors for three terms, and nothing threatening has come out of it. Now, even assuming that protests remain lowkey – not something that can be guaranteed, since Primorye is a traditionally feisty region and gave Putin his third worst official results in the 2018 Presidential elections – United Russia will have a much harder time eking out a halfway respectable performance in that region come the 2021 Duma elections.
Well, come to think of it, I do have an idea as to why this happened, though it’s a banal and depressing one – that the worst kakistocratic impulses of the Putin regime are coming out into the open with increasing regularity.
Together with Head of the National Guard Viktor Zolotov’s bizarre rant on YouTube where he challenges Navalny to a duel in response to Navalny’s corruption allegations, and the clusterfuck of an interview with the alleged Skripal assassins, having all happened in just the past week, there is no escaping from this impression.
I don’t endorse electoral fraud in most cases, but I’d like to know more about this scenario. Was the KPRF candidate particularly incompetent/unruly/dangerous etc? If it did come from high up, there should be a reason why. I don’t buy into the open kakistocracy meme given how things are run (comparatively) well in Russia compared to so many of the countries I’ve spent time in.
Gerad here…….what a berk this dimwit Anatoly Karlin is, always willing to accept the worst on Russia ..impervious to how B.S the allegations are.
In the previous week the United Russia candidate got 46.5%, compared to 24% of the Communist party selection. No way on earth has the Communist party turned around this major difference (with similar turnout levels to last week), or the United Russia authorities failed to mobilise 3.5% extra turnout of their supporters, or state employees.
Love the language you used here! This is definitely an aging, “mature” regime.
The man looked like a bandit to me. Primorye has a history of criminals (“криминальный авторитет”) in government, they are kind of local elite.
‘Kakistocracy’…Putin, nah!
He kak. 🙂
Well in my view there’s good, entirely respectable ways of dealing with commie upstarts.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/021/663/d6cbbc1a56206e29080477cbc3cbf640e7995a09407e8dfea5bb50c1d48e2860_1.jpg
But electoral fraud is a losing strategy even from the POV of the best interests of an authoritarian regime (I explain why here).
Yes I remember that piece, made a lot of sense. Sometimes it might be justified in emergency situations though. Full democracy for any group below 115 IQ is a sham.
It would have been be a big symbolic defeat for Putin/UR.
The second round was just one week after the Eastern Economic Forum 2018 in Vladivostok and Putin who visited the city gave a the UR candidate a personal endorsement.
The best way to stay in power is to do what the US oligarchy does and coordinate media messaging between Hollywood, TV shows and news media. My understanding is that the Putin coalition does this and has since near the beginning. This seems much better than doing lots of vote fraud, though it’s not a bad idea to do a minimal amount, just to make sure the system works for emergencies.
There really is no good way to run a country. Life long dictatorship is fragile, democracy leads to rule by oligarchs. What to do? I don’t know.
You can reduce oligarchic influence by introducing direct democracy.
OT: A Russian military Il-20 aircraft with 14 service members on board went off the radars during an attack by four Israeli jets on Syria’s Latakia province, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
It could be that Syrian air-defense shot down Russian plane, while trying to defend themselves from Israeli attacks. But either way, that makes Israel responsible for the deaths of Russian military personnel.
This incident could have been avoided if Putin moved to stop Israeli bombings in Syria. I predicted that something like this could happen…
This is not credible.
Syrian air defense operates jointly with the Russian in Syria and the systems are integrated
This is what US is saying anyway.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/17/politics/syrian-regime-shoots-down-russian-plane/index.html
So do we accept these casualties as the new Syrian norm or adress the problem of Israel, at last?
I resent Russia treating Israel with some kind of neutrality, when they have always been hostile. It doesn’t mean going all resistance axis and align with Iran, but patting Bibi on the back was ludicrous. Arming Al Qaeda, which has killed lots of Russians, is thoroughly hostile. Various aerial provocations before, and now this, is thoroughly hostile.
On the same note, a special attention should be drawn to Sputnik and Pogrom if Israel Shamir’s observation that they’re soft on Israel is correct. Kosher right and a ‘controlled’ (from abroad) opposition they would be, then.
All “New Right” groups in Europe shed off traditional anti-semitism associated with the right and replaced it with tacitly approve Islamophobia and strongly encouraged pro-Zionism where Israel is seen as a shining example of how to deal with Muslims and Arabs and immigrants. On either side whether it left or right Jews play both sides. Barbara Specter tells us that Jews will lead the pro immigration movement and Israel is engineering 2015 flood of refugees and at the same time it is believed that if we only gave Israel everything it wants it will use its magic wand and our problems will be over.
SiP would be the last problem to be honest – the most popular Russian political TV talk show is hosted by a very pro-Israel jew (Vladimir Soloviev) and an Israeli intelligence guy (Yakov Kedmi) is one of the regular “experts”.
This is not some webzine, this is mainstream national TV.
And what are the candidates promising? Is this commie ‘based’?
Sounds like a description of every election in the USA for the last 20 years.
They are not kosher right. They, unlike Israel Shamir, just don’t give a hoot for the Palestinians. Neither do I.
Hostility to Jewry should be the default attitude of any real Russian nationalist. Anyone, who doesn’t exibit it, his nationalist credentials are in question.
In meantime, Russian MoD agrees with USA and thinks Syrians hit the plane by accident.
https://ria.ru/syria/20180918/1528773812.html?referrer_block=index_main_1
You don’t have to care about the Palestinians, but about how many more daggers the Israelis will plant in your back, instead of praising their nationalist and rightist instincts. Nationalist and far right they are, but at your expense.
I don’t read Russian, I can’t scrutinize SiP. All I know is far right parties and personalities that are just sock puppets for Israeli parasitism are a dime a dozen in Europe nowadays. They are the ultimate cucks and deceivers, ie people who make the right sound bites on immigration and islam but can be counted on to preserve the essential, Jewish mafias and privilege.
why is this news? there is nothing ‘blatant’ about this particular turnaround. such small swings in an ongoing count routinely happen everywhere.
The ultimate cucks are nationalists who side with actual (Jewish) Bolsheviks because they seem to hate Jews as much as they do, against other nationalists.
The chief editor of SiP is a literal cuck, manifested both in his personal life and in his defense of Russian women fucking niggers during the World Cup.
https://twitter.com/ArtyomLukin/status/1041894052940210177
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Putin-pancakes-960×576.jpg
that wouldn’t be me then. Can’t really point fingers at you, and you were labelled as more or less a Hitlerite already because of some of your past comments. I have seen them and no you’re not naive about them, although you seem to always backpedal somewhat when touching the subject, offer the occasional praise, tries to be fair as if you committed one grave transgression. You even make the same point as Peterson where he emphasizes IQ to defuse accusations of mafia-like nepotism and entryism, which are for everyone to see and the real story here.
You just have to ask yourself, who does the most harm? Hapless kebabs, refugees, or the chosen ones? even if that doesn’t mean cutting migrants or kebab any slack.
There are two kinds of people. Those who are on the side of the underdog and those who are on the side of the top dog. The first ones when watching a boxing match will root for the boxer who is being beaten and the other ones will be rooting for the boxer who does the beating and will be asking for more. Karlin belongs to the second group. Obviously people who undergo some growth and incorporate some ethical dimension can transcend this reflexive division and make decisions on the basis of what is right or wrong in moral sense. But before it happens they are often incapable to formulate a moral argument. This is one of the reason that they always end up losing to the left who mastered using moral argumentation. Good luck for Karlin with his “[I] don’t give a hoot for the Palestinians” attitude.
Tarasenko vs Ischenko could be Ukrainian elections.
Oh no, wait. They’re not Jews.
Another possibility is to set up stable authority with a good incentive structure. I think it is worth seriously considering Moldbug’s idea of a Sovcorp with a CEO having operational authority and a board of shareholders that can fire the CEO. However, I doubt Moldbug’s claim that maximizing property prices is the right principle for producing good incentives, and I am afraid that foreign share holders will not have sufficient skin in the game, while restricting share-holding to residents seems likely to just reproduce the oligarchy. Perhaps Hanson’s futarchy has to be worked in too. Anyhow, I’d like to see more small to midsize experiments in governance, since the only certain thing is that what we have isn’t working.
https://twitter.com/27khv/status/1042345516821045248
https://twitter.com/27khv/status/1042349632314114049
Looks like even the kremlins realized this was too much.
I like to think I believe to the first group, which is sane, and doesn’t want to sacrifice Russians for retarded chiliastic causes – be it holy war against capitalists, or against AngloZionists.
utu belongs to the second group, which wants to fight dem Jooz to the last Russian for make benefit of Palestinians – a people with whom Russia has no significant connections, who will provide Russia with approximately zero benefits, and most of all, a people who have acquired such a reputation for backstabbing their own friends that even their fellow Arabs steer clear of them (outside rhetoric, that is).
The election results have been officially annulled. Likely fraud was idiotic local initiative, not “kremlins” idea.
Russia goes out of its way to be nice to Israel, it does not respond when Israel bombs its allies even very near Russia’s own bases, and yet Israel just killed 14 Russians nonetheless.
Those Russians were sacrificed. I don’t even know for what cause.
But if you believe there was anything accidental about the actions of one of the most professional and experienced air forces in the world, starting from the 1 minute warning, the choice of location to attack and ending with the choice for “cover” (that’s assuming they didn’t just shoot it down themselves), I have a bridge in Crimea to sell you.
https://twitter.com/KremlinRussia_E/status/1042872857162854402
http://kremlin.ru/events/security-council/58602