6 ms·

Lovely theatre to pretend the outcome isn't rigged already.

ineedasername 5y ago
That depends on just how fine-grained their control on the election is. They might not lose, but they could still be embarrassed or greatly inconvenienced by the results. And you don't always need to chip away at the armor too much before a critical weakness is revealed. Once the party is no longer viewed as unassailable things could change more rapidly. I'll admit that's a very optimistic view of things though. It has to be a little hard to stick your neck out in Russian politics when the result may be transdermal poison secretly smeared on the insides of your underwear. (And that is not an exaggeration or speculation of the risk)
- baybal2 5y ago
  Vladivostok is one place in Russia where Putin genuinely struggles to get even single digits of approval ratings. It's one of the only places in Russia a jury acquits a person 3 times, just for him to finally get jailed for the 4th. 2018 token provincial elections had Lutun's candidate lose despite ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE fraud. And yet they still pulled this at the end: https://meduza.io/impro/LCjzlLaaoQX5pld_zlmxXqom_TRmlz9WhemQSXRusxU/resizing_type:fit/width:1040/height:0/enlarge:1/quality:95/aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWR1/emEuaW8vaW1hZ2Uv/YXR0YWNobWVudHMv/aW1hZ2VzLzAwMy8y/ODcvODU2L29yaWdp/bmFsLzZpSm1CQm1C/T29KVzdULWpndkg1/d3cucG5n.webp https://meduza.io/impro/LCjzlLaaoQX5pld_zlmxXqom_TRmlz9WhemQ...
  - gbuk2013 5y ago
    > Vladivostok is one place in Russia where Putin genuinely struggles to get even single digits of approval ratings. Citation needed. In the last election in Primorsky Kray Putin got 65% up from 57% in the previous election. Pretty much the lowest in the country, but far from the single digits you claim. https://regnum.ru/news/polit/2394633.html https://regnum.ru/news/polit/2394633.html Even Levada approval polls (pro-opposition “foreign agent”) shows he is the most popular politician (although they don’t provide a breakdown by region). https://www.levada.ru/2021/02/04/prezidentskie-rejtingi-i-polozhenie-del-v-strane/ https://www.levada.ru/2021/02/04/prezidentskie-rejtingi-i-po...
    - Miiko 5y ago
      > In the last election in Primorsky Kray Putin got 65% up from 57% in the previous election. Yes, and in 1927 Liberian general election Charles King received around 240,000 votes (out of 15,000 registered voters). So what?
- jhgb 5y ago
  > They might not lose, but they could still be embarrassed or greatly inconvenienced by the results. "Embarrassed by the results"? They didn't seem to have been embarrassed by this: https://manipulatori.cz/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Sn%C3%ADmek-obrazovky-1010.png https://manipulatori.cz/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Sn%C3%ADm...
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    What is your point? We're talking about the current election and whether or not Navalny's new initiative will change the way things have gone in the past. By definition, the issue is whether or not past results will be repeated. Pointing to those past results is supposed to mean... what? That things won't change? Maybe they won't. But the claim here is that Navalny's actions might move the needle a little. You can't point to past results as an objection to that claim because then you're just saying "The results won't change from the past, because look at these results from the past." It is tautological. If you object to that claim, the way to justify it is by addressing how Navalny's initiative might be useless. And it might be useless: it depends on how many people it reached and, as I said originally, how fine grained the current party's control is over the election outcomes.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      My point was that such results would most likely not lead to any embarrassment since the embarrassment threshold for elections in Russia seems to be very high. I did not say a word about anything changing or not.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ParoxysmalVigor 5y ago
Election rigging is a finite resource. After certain amount regime loses it's legitimacy. This in turn creates a regime phase transition, which in certain scenarios could be not fatal (as Belarus and Venezuela examples shows us), but very painful for the elites and increases all sorts of risks, especialy for current incumbent. Also there are investors, external and internal, which are too all over risks, this damages economy and national currency.
- tomerv 5y ago
  Election rigging is a renewable resource. At the start, you can tilt the results a bit in your favor. As you gain power you also gain more influence and popularity, and then you can build deeper structures of corruption, which enable further election rigging. The cycle continues until it implodes with a revolution. Then the citizens are left with a broken government - after removing the corrupted parts - and must rebuild everything. The lack of structure allows more corrupted players to enter, and that's why a single revolution us not always enough to move a country from a fake democracy to a functioning one.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
monday_ 5y ago
Of course it's rigged. That's not what "Smart voting" is about. The SV works by recommending the candidates that a) are not the ones actively pushed by the Kremlin b) have a shot at winning or credibly pretending they did. These could be some batshit crazy Stalinists, mobsters or whatever - the point is that they aren't the guys that the suits in Kremlin have already secretly anointed. In short, this will hurt Kremlin's credibility and put an organizational tax on all its future efforts. With the pandemic, an economy in deep crisis and Putin's term ending in 2024 he'd need a lot of political capital and SV hits him where it hurts. Here's a bit longer explanation. The point is that in autocracies elections are not rigged by altering an Excel column. In Russia we have empirical statistical evidence to this: the presence of poll watchers has a very clear effect on the electoral outcomes, the rigging elasticity is capped by the anti-Putin sentiment etc. This is a consequence of how the elections are organized: the local authorities are handed the required numbers and told to deliver, as a test of their loyalty, capability and popularity. They have limited number of ways for this: they can mobilize their base, force their dependents (state employees, the military etc) to vote or press local polling committees to alter the results. If they overplay their hand, they will face local unrest (this actually happens a lot) and the Kremlin will jettison them without a second thought - so this is a balancing act. The efficiency of all their tools is capped by the popularity of Kremlin and the overtly pro-Kremlin forces, and it is at all-times low and still going down. So to get things done they need to depress the turnout - and this creates an opening for organized opposition. If openly pro-Kremlin candidates are hurt en mass then the president's admin would have to renegotiate with both the winners and the losers, effectively losing a lot of organizational cohesion, and that's on top on very public humiliation. With Putin's popularity near its all-time low and going down and 2 years before a very uncertain end to his current term, that's a lot of damage - although likely far from enough to topple the guy. But we take what we can get and this may be a rather large take.

That depends on just how fine-grained their control on the election is. They might not lose, but they could still be embarrassed or greatly inconvenienced by the results. And you don't always need to chip away at the armor too much before a critical weakness is revealed. Once the party is no longer viewed as unassailable things could change more rapidly. I'll admit that's a very optimistic view of things though. It has to be a little hard to stick your neck out in Russian politics when the result may be transdermal poison secretly smeared on the insides of your underwear. (And that is not an exaggeration or speculation of the risk)

baybal2 5y ago
Vladivostok is one place in Russia where Putin genuinely struggles to get even single digits of approval ratings. It's one of the only places in Russia a jury acquits a person 3 times, just for him to finally get jailed for the 4th. 2018 token provincial elections had Lutun's candidate lose despite ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE fraud. And yet they still pulled this at the end: https://meduza.io/impro/LCjzlLaaoQX5pld_zlmxXqom_TRmlz9WhemQSXRusxU/resizing_type:fit/width:1040/height:0/enlarge:1/quality:95/aHR0cHM6Ly9tZWR1/emEuaW8vaW1hZ2Uv/YXR0YWNobWVudHMv/aW1hZ2VzLzAwMy8y/ODcvODU2L29yaWdp/bmFsLzZpSm1CQm1C/T29KVzdULWpndkg1/d3cucG5n.webp https://meduza.io/impro/LCjzlLaaoQX5pld_zlmxXqom_TRmlz9WhemQ...
- gbuk2013 5y ago
  > Vladivostok is one place in Russia where Putin genuinely struggles to get even single digits of approval ratings. Citation needed. In the last election in Primorsky Kray Putin got 65% up from 57% in the previous election. Pretty much the lowest in the country, but far from the single digits you claim. https://regnum.ru/news/polit/2394633.html https://regnum.ru/news/polit/2394633.html Even Levada approval polls (pro-opposition “foreign agent”) shows he is the most popular politician (although they don’t provide a breakdown by region). https://www.levada.ru/2021/02/04/prezidentskie-rejtingi-i-polozhenie-del-v-strane/ https://www.levada.ru/2021/02/04/prezidentskie-rejtingi-i-po...
  - Miiko 5y ago
    > In the last election in Primorsky Kray Putin got 65% up from 57% in the previous election. Yes, and in 1927 Liberian general election Charles King received around 240,000 votes (out of 15,000 registered voters). So what?
jhgb 5y ago
> They might not lose, but they could still be embarrassed or greatly inconvenienced by the results. "Embarrassed by the results"? They didn't seem to have been embarrassed by this: https://manipulatori.cz/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Sn%C3%ADmek-obrazovky-1010.png https://manipulatori.cz/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Sn%C3%ADm...
- ineedasername 5y ago
  What is your point? We're talking about the current election and whether or not Navalny's new initiative will change the way things have gone in the past. By definition, the issue is whether or not past results will be repeated. Pointing to those past results is supposed to mean... what? That things won't change? Maybe they won't. But the claim here is that Navalny's actions might move the needle a little. You can't point to past results as an objection to that claim because then you're just saying "The results won't change from the past, because look at these results from the past." It is tautological. If you object to that claim, the way to justify it is by addressing how Navalny's initiative might be useless. And it might be useless: it depends on how many people it reached and, as I said originally, how fine grained the current party's control is over the election outcomes.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    My point was that such results would most likely not lead to any embarrassment since the embarrassment threshold for elections in Russia seems to be very high. I did not say a word about anything changing or not.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ParoxysmalVigor 5y ago

Election rigging is a finite resource. After certain amount regime loses it's legitimacy. This in turn creates a regime phase transition, which in certain scenarios could be not fatal (as Belarus and Venezuela examples shows us), but very painful for the elites and increases all sorts of risks, especialy for current incumbent. Also there are investors, external and internal, which are too all over risks, this damages economy and national currency.

tomerv 5y ago
Election rigging is a renewable resource. At the start, you can tilt the results a bit in your favor. As you gain power you also gain more influence and popularity, and then you can build deeper structures of corruption, which enable further election rigging. The cycle continues until it implodes with a revolution. Then the citizens are left with a broken government - after removing the corrupted parts - and must rebuild everything. The lack of structure allows more corrupted players to enter, and that's why a single revolution us not always enough to move a country from a fake democracy to a functioning one.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

monday_ 5y ago

Of course it's rigged. That's not what "Smart voting" is about. The SV works by recommending the candidates that a) are not the ones actively pushed by the Kremlin b) have a shot at winning or credibly pretending they did. These could be some batshit crazy Stalinists, mobsters or whatever - the point is that they aren't the guys that the suits in Kremlin have already secretly anointed. In short, this will hurt Kremlin's credibility and put an organizational tax on all its future efforts. With the pandemic, an economy in deep crisis and Putin's term ending in 2024 he'd need a lot of political capital and SV hits him where it hurts. Here's a bit longer explanation. The point is that in autocracies elections are not rigged by altering an Excel column. In Russia we have empirical statistical evidence to this: the presence of poll watchers has a very clear effect on the electoral outcomes, the rigging elasticity is capped by the anti-Putin sentiment etc. This is a consequence of how the elections are organized: the local authorities are handed the required numbers and told to deliver, as a test of their loyalty, capability and popularity. They have limited number of ways for this: they can mobilize their base, force their dependents (state employees, the military etc) to vote or press local polling committees to alter the results. If they overplay their hand, they will face local unrest (this actually happens a lot) and the Kremlin will jettison them without a second thought - so this is a balancing act. The efficiency of all their tools is capped by the popularity of Kremlin and the overtly pro-Kremlin forces, and it is at all-times low and still going down. So to get things done they need to depress the turnout - and this creates an opening for organized opposition. If openly pro-Kremlin candidates are hurt en mass then the president's admin would have to renegotiate with both the winners and the losers, effectively losing a lot of organizational cohesion, and that's on top on very public humiliation. With Putin's popularity near its all-time low and going down and 2 years before a very uncertain end to his current term, that's a lot of damage - although likely far from enough to topple the guy. But we take what we can get and this may be a rather large take.