Three near-identical Boris Vishnevskys on St Petersburg election ballot
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Note the two "Joseph Russo" entries on the ballot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_John_F._K...
(The link opened fine for me.)
The signature process is usually outsourced to people making $.25 a signature. And there is a HUGE amount of fraud. Even when checking against the voter file. Which BTW is public info for most places, which makes it easy to fill in 'correct' data.
This happens even on legitimate large campaigns with controls who do NOT want to cheat lest they get thrown off ballot. But hire enough field organizers some are bound to cheat.
That's why usually submit sometimes 2X the required number.
Listing candidates to intentionally confuse voters is completely different than (correctly!) challenging the legitimacy of voter signatures. Calling the latter a "trick" is completely dishonest.
This whataboutism in America is exhausting.
Edit: in the Russian case, they also changed their appearance to match
According to a sibling comment, this strategy goes back to JohnF Kennedy at least. Except that the Russians take it to the next level
Why did Stalinist Russia bother with show trials? The appearance of legitimacy is enough to give cover to people who approve of the government without wanting to own up to its dirty tricks, and to mute the voices of those who disapprove.
look at Belarus, when stuff became too obvious, people started to display dissatisfaction. That is Putin’s fear IMO.
And he knows that, but if he won the election with 60% of votes, it would show that there are other candidates or political parties with tremendous support. Yeah, they can exist and even win in different states across the country for different political roles.
Still, the idea that he wants to show to people is that he is supported by the majority and supported with overwhelming superiority in votes. He doesn't need fraud votes to win. He needs to fraud voting to show the dramatic differences in support.
It's all about image in people's heads.
Majority of people are afraid to say otherwise. I've watched some deadpan comedian from Lithuania do some interviews in Moscow. People face change and they immediately walk away after mentioning Putin. Of course the best question was:
"What do you think Russia would look like if Putin was homosexual?"
In one of the FL cases, reporters went to the house of the "other" one and he literally couldn't say why he was on the ballot. That is my recollection of the story I read at the time.
Correction: 'political consulting' is probably the correct translation, however it doesn't convey the same cynicism expressed by 'political technology'.
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-michael-madigan-c...
If we win this thing, then filing sham candidates will become illegal in the U.S. It's an utterly corrupt practice.
Also this seems to be civil case, not a criminal one, so I'm not sure how it'd make anything illegal?
As a practical matter, the court would rule that sham candidates are impermissible, and then their opponents would have an opportunity to remove them from the ballot via a civil lawsuit, or seek sanctions again whoever put them up, or collect civil damages, or in an extreme case overturn an election altogether.
But then the Rhinoceros Party, a satirical political party, announced a new candidate for Beauce named... Maxime Bernier. When asked about the confusion, the Rhinoceros Party's Maxime Bernier said, "If you're not sure, then vote for both!".
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/maxime-bernier-rhino...
The Conservative candidate won with 22817 votes, the People's Party candidate came second with 16772, and the Rhinoceros Party candidate came last with 1072 votes and another 1147 were rejected. This left the People's Party with no seats in parliament.
Note that even if the Rhinoceros votes went for the peoples party the same thing would have happened...
Which is probably for the best. If this type of trickery had made a meaningful difference, the people fooled by the trick would have had some legitimate complaints. Moreover it would have really undermined the credibility of the winner, even if it wasn't their doing.
That's 58% vs 42% just counting the votes that went to the PPC/Conservatives. 39% vs 28% looking at all the votes in the riding. The rhino candidate got less than 2% of the votes in the riding.
It definitely didn't actually change the results.
Partly this is because of the way primaries work here (they are open and there is no “official” party-backed candidate).
Anyway, there is nothing stopping a candidate from claiming they prefer a party that they don’t actually hope to represent.
Separately, giving airtime to ridiculous conspiracies that even you don't believe is simply not helpful.
"This" implies that the Rhinoceros Party prank KEPT Bernier from having a seat. Simple math shows that's not the case.
Describing the PPC as "far-right" is a good way to out yourself as far-left.
Or are you one of those childish people who throw around "far-right" as a synonym for "anything I don't like"?
Yes, I'll go and vote anyway. No, this won't change the outcome, but at least I'll be able to tell myself that I did my part.
It's not impossible, obviously–especially if you have full control of at least anyone important. But plausible deniability suffers rather fast, and that's a valuable assets at the Putin-level of dic(tator|k)ishness.
Sometimes, in some far-flung region, an election will end up being fair. Then they still find a way to ultimately "fix" the outcome — see what happened in Khabarovsk with everyone's favorite mayor Sergey Furgal. They found a court case on him from very long ago, arrested him, flew him to Moscow, then Putin dismissed him from mayorship "for loss of trust". Yeah sure, people elected him and had no problems with him, but it's lack of Putin's trust that caused him to lose his office against his and people's will.
It's strange that people really don't realize how easy it is to cheat; just a little bit of leverage in the right place can tip an election.
It is especially prevalent among parties oriented towards Russian speaking populace in the Baltics.
I've never seen it work, but maybe there is a bit of Ross Perot(not that Clinton/Bush looked like Perot) effect.
PS it is hilarious that when I made a comment I didn't realize this could be taken as a what-aboutism comment.
So on a meta level I should be more lenient when posters do similar things in other threads. Maybe not every poster is actively engaging in organized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism but there is an urge to draw parallels on some psychological level.
I'm from the Baltics and I've never ever heard of anything similar going on in any of the three countries.
Unused ballots are good for bathroom reading :)
When I say fringe these parties get less than 1% and are rarely in the news. So the tactic is not working.
Here is just one example from 2010 elections. https://www.cvk.lv/cgi-bin/wdbcgiw/base/komisijas2010.CVKAND...
Obviously that guy is not the Russian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_Galkin
It would be an interesting analysis to see if notable names appear more often as candidates and do they draw more plus(FOR) signs than regular candidates.
These names are put in a middle of the list (meaning they have low priority for actual parliament seats).
If you are an uneducated and undecided voter, you see someone popular and you see, wow this person is in this party, let's take a flyer on this party.
Still the question is would this person be running in the election were their name not a match or similar to someone publicly known.
These names usually appear in the middle of the list - so are unlikely to be major players themselves.
I looked through our local candidate lists and found more suspicious cases.
There are instances of not complete matches but things like a security guard from a populist party with the same uncommon last name as the prime minister at a time.
Could be pure coincidence but I doubt it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Distinguished_Gentleman
Talk about life imitating art and all that.
I bet that this didn't helped at the hour of counting the ballots and I wouldn't be surprised to know that a few votes were assigned wrongly that night at the slighest opportunity.
Boris Vishnevsky, as many other candidates (including my own father) are being elected not through centralised party lists, but through single-mandate districts. (I think it's similar to UK electorate system). And while United Russia (Putin's party) total numbers over the whole country will be very tightly controlled, results of those district-based elections are, in general, much more honest.
Anyway, a recent anekdot from Russian democracy illustrating why the ruling power is so obstructing oppositional candidates. A mayor of small town to make elections legally democratic, ie to have at least 2 candidates while of course not allowing any real oppositional candidates, ran his office janitor woman against himself. The people voted for the janitor.
(But I really did.)
Also, the authorities don't care about people voting confidently at all, quite the opposite.
It's mandated by law though to list candidates' previous names if changed, which is done in this case. But you have to be aware of this spoiler strategy to notice, which most people aren't.
Can you explain this?
Organized fraud is still as endemic as always, but it still needs to be whitewashed, so every little bit helps. Same reason why they herd people at workplaces to vote - a 100% fraudulent system would just conjure turnout from thin air as needed.
So, what is being falsified? Everything.
1. Public polls (including fake "independent" polling companies appearing out of nowhere just few months before the elections)
2. Exit polls
3. Debates (some times fake doppelganger opposition candidates are sent to debates instead of real ones!)
4. Media landscape (again, fake opposition floods the screen time)
5. Politics on the ground (fake protest leaders, informers, provocateurs, rabble rousers sent to party meetings, fake opposition canvassers)
6. Fake party politics (fake opposition parties, genuine opposition being infiltrated, and packed full of informers, saboteurs, and etc, recruitment of turncoats)
7. Fake voters (obvious cases of people hired to vote under others' IDs, but also faked voter registration, and tallies. That's how tiny villages near arctic circle suddenly get hundreds of thousands registered voters out of nowhere)
8. Fake ballots (no explanation needed, but this also includes 20000% turnouts in mail ballot, or voting in embassies abroad)
9. Fake census data (to gerrymander, to manipulate turnout numbers, and to avoid second rounds, or minimal turnout limits in regions)
10. Fake elections (some times they don't take place at all, and people come to face a closed door, or they take place, and then they claim that they didn't happen! And then, they throw away the ballots.)
11. Fake ballot counting (well, it's the most conventional faking, but even there, there is an "innovation" — fake electoral commissions. A real one given a boot under gunpoint, and fake one comes, and stages everything.)
12. Media coverage of elections (the famous 146% Putin victory in Rostov)
13. Court system (a court claims to issue a fake recount order, but actually not issuing any orders, or a fake opposition candidate claiming to sue the incumbent candidate, or electoral comission, while not really doing so, or just blatantly claiming, that the white is black, and the ballot count was fair.)
14. Fake post-election protests (to steer people away from real ones)
15. Fake statistics (when the dust settles, alleged math geniuses, and statistics PhDs are invited to draw digits, and explain how a 146% vote victory is statistically possible)
A few percents of Russia's population are employed every 4 years in this circus, just like during USSR's CPSU elections where election fakers were indoctrinated into "a deep sense of higher purpose" doing so. Small people are comforted by letting them feel themselves being "big men," and "doing stuff big boys do," if just for a few days, and at the expense of the rest of country's population.
It looks better when the police uses violence to prevent problem people from voting, than to manufacture votes out of thin air.
Of course, I'm not sure how that'd work in Russia. I assume at least some of the criminal masterminds who fill the role of the West's owner class have a, like, inkan [0] or something.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)#Japanese_usag...
The various UK sagas for lockdown eye checks etc would be easier to monitor.
> “Double” candidates regularly pop up during Russia’s election cycles, which can be surprisingly cut-throat despite the expectation that the ruling United Russia party will maintain a majority in the Duma. The rising tide of opposition to United Russia and growing support for the Communist KPRF have apparently spooked the government and nominating doppelgängers can siphon off precious votes in close contests.
But in any case, those particular candidates had their names and surnames changed but for whatever reason their patronymics were left intact.
I wouldn't hesitate to follow great old russian tradition and take a loan. A few million rubles in cash here and there from those shady and unscrupulous lenders, then miss a payment or two and see what happens! A completely legal way to remind those people that Russia isn't European country yet. Nor Saint Petersburg is Miami.
True enough. Saint Petersburg has a fantastic history, brought us some of the most important writers in history and is full of theatres, palaces and one of the best museums in the world. It's also very beautiful.
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/india-election-party-s...
The symbols of recognised political parties are fairly common knowledge and are emphasised during rge campaign
I haven't figured out if they mean well and are just sorely misguided, or are actually trolls themselves here from places like Reddit where such bad faith activity actually happens in every single post.
It's called a "spoiler" and they don't necessarily have to have the same or similar names to be effective, in fact, a similar tactic was used here less than a year ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/us/florida-senate-race-fr...