The anti-corruption campaigner joins forces with Yabloko, the Communists and Just Russia to form ‘RosVybory’
Yulia Ponomareva
Anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny on Tuesday
announced the launch of his new project,
RosVybory, to recruit monitors for the March 4 presidential election.
RosVybory monitors are planned to be deployed to the most fraud-prone precincts, where violations were registered in the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections and where the ruling United Russia party received a suspiciously high vote.
The project, joined by some 1,100 people within the first two hours since it was started, will be run “in close contact” with at least three parties, in particular Communists, Just Russia and Yabloko, project coordinators said.
The news followed hot on the heels of the Central Elections Commission’s decision to bar Yabloko party leader Grigory Yavlinsky from the election, citing forgeries among the 2 million signatures he had to collect to apply for registration.
Barring Yavlinsky leaves Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Just Russia’s Sergei Mironov, LDPR’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Communists’ Gennady Zyuganov and billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov in the race.
“The only reason why Yavlinsky is being withdrawn from the race is the need to get rid of Yabloko monitors,” popular LiveJournal blogger Andrei Malgin
wrote.
“[Yabloko] did their job better than others in the parliamentary elections,” Malgin said. “They registered more violations, summed them all up, compiled the ‘Churov list’ [of election officials caught fixing the vote] and are now fighting in the courts. Putin understands that Yavlinsky is not [a serious] challenger for him, but he doesn’t want dozens of thousands of professional monitors in ‘the fairest elections’ anyway.”
Yabloko may still be able to send its monitors to precincts as representatives of its publication, Yabloko Rossii, party spokesman Igor Yakovlev told The Moscow News. Journalists are allowed to observe elections by law.
This still limits Yabloko’s opportunity to monitor elections. “Even though the statuses of monitors and of representatives of the mass media are very similar, in real life the latter are more often kicked out from polling stations,” Yakovlev said.
In a separate development Tuesday, the independent Golos vote monitoring group was notified that its Moscow office would have its power cut off from January 25 through March 6, due to repairs.
Golos carries out long-term monitoring of election campaigns, trains monitors and runs a popular Violations Map web portal to collect reports of violations from across the country.
Journalist Oleg Kozyrev
wrote in his blog that authorities’ forcing Golos to leave their office only proved that “Putin is afraid to lose the election in which he selected candidates himself.”
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