The Real Russia. Today. Throwing out Primorye's election results, detainees' right to prison, and Russia's ‘series of unfortunate events’

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

This day in history. On September 19, 1939, the Red Army seized Vilnius. Two days earlier, the USSR invaded Poland, in accordance with secret protocols in the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact.

• Russia is throwing out suspicious gubernatorial election results in Primorsky Krai
• Kremlin human rights official wants to get convicts out of pretrial detention sooner
• Ahead of runoff election, Russian governor addresses constituents in video where she says voters' first-round weak support surprised her
• Opinion commentaries: Maxim Trudolyubov on Russia's “series of unfortunate events,” and Sergey Glandin and Anton Imennov on how open-source information available through Google is damning Russia's oligarchs

Throwing out Primorye's suspicious election results 🗳️

Russia’s Central Election Commission is urging regional election officials in the Primorsky Krai to invalidate the results of last Sunday’s runoff gubernatorial election. Commissioner Ella Pamfilova justified the recommendation on the grounds that it is impossible to determine the race’s outcome reliably because of significant violations at multiple polling stations. In fact, the commission's “recommendation” is more like a direct order, given that federal officials also say they will invalidate Primorye's results themselves, if regional officials refuse to do so. Officials in Primorye have promised to reach a decision by Thursday, September 20.

Federal election officials have singled out 13 polling stations where significant irregularities occurred on September 16. According to Pamfilova, emergency workers temporarily restricted access to entire precincts, making it impossible to determine “the authenticity of the stated will of the citizenry.” More than 24,000 voters were registered at these stations, and United Russia candidate Andrey Tarasenko defeated Communist Party challenger Andrey Ishchenko by just 7,000 votes, meaning that these ballots could have decided the election’s outcome, Pamfilova said. The commissioner did not, however, explain why officials can’t simply invalidate the results at these precincts and recognize the results from all other polling stations.

Some in Moscow hold Primorye’s election officials responsible for the gubernatorial fiasco. Central Election Commission member Boris Ebzeev told the news agency Interfax that he has doubts about the “competency” of election officials in Primorye. "We're talking about systematic, well planned violations that led to the result that you and I are seeing," Ebzeev explained. Pamfilova, meanwhile, says she doesn’t endorse this assessment, and has thanked Primorye’s regional commission for its prompt cooperation with her agency in Moscow.

The Central Election Commission promises to provide police with information about violations at polling stations. “We hope that law enforcement agencies will find out who called in about smoke and who was behind this,” Pamfilova said. Nikolai Bulaev, the commissioner’s deputy, also urged Tarasenko and Ishchenko to withdraw their police reports against the voting precinct chairpersons, arguing that “these people aren’t guilty of anything.” “You don’t have the courage or the guts to fight against the authorities, so you’re fighting women who will lose their careers and have nothing to feed their families, if they open criminal cases,” he said.

Tarasenko supports the invalidation of the election results, but Ishchenko objects. The acting governor says he won’t be able to “look his constituents in the eye,” if his victory lacks legitimacy, and he advocates “doing everything necessary to remove any doubts.” Ishchenko, on the other hand, calls the Central Election Commission’s decision “completely absurd.” “The law states that [violations must be recorded at] a minimum of 25 percent of voting precincts, in order to invalidate an entire election. No, I don’t agree with this. We elected a governor,” the Communist candidate argued.

New elections could take place three months from now. It’s still unclear if Tarasenko and Ishchenko will run again, if new elections are called. Tarasenko told the news agency TASS that he wouldn’t run again, but minutes later he promised a group of supporters in Vladivostok that he would in fact participate in a third round of elections. Ishchenko, meanwhile, says the Communist Party’s Central Committee will decide if he runs again.

It’s been ages since Russia invalidated gubernatorial election results. This happened a few times in the 1990s, but the last occurrence was in 2002, when Krasnoyarsk election officials twice overturned Alexander Khloponin’s victory due to voting violations. (A court invalided the first election, and the Central Election Commission invalidated the second election.)

Let his people go (to prison) 🕊️

Presidential Human Rights Council Chairman Mikhail Fedotov is advocating legislation that would send inmates from the harsh confines of pretrial detention to the relatively easier conditions of prison colonies before their first-instance court convictions take effect (before any appeals have been filed or heard).

Currently, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service transfers some pretrial detainees to prison colonies before their appellate rulings, but overcrowding (not human rights or any formal policy) dictates these moves.

Fedotov says roughly a quarter of all people in pretrial detention centers have already been convicted by first-instance courts, including inmates convicted in group cases who aren’t challenging their verdicts.

• In July 2018, President Putin signed legislation that recalculates how pretrial detention is weighed when determining how much time should be considered “already served” for pretrial detainees who are ultimately sentenced to prison. The legislation was first introduced in June 2008.
• Under the new law, one day in pretrial detention is equal to one and a half days in a standard penal colony or a juvenile correctional facility. The exchange rate jumps to two days in a penal colony settlement. The old one-to-one coefficient still applies to convicts placed in high-security prisons. Under the new system, a day’s house arrest is equal to half a day in pretrial detention, making it equal to 0.75 days in a standard regime penal colony or juvenile center, or one full day in a penal colony settlement.

Pre-election jitters 😬

Vladimir Governor Svetlana Orlova, who faces stiff competition in a runoff election on September 23, appealed to her constituents in a recorded video on Wednesday, saying that she “didn’t expect” her low support in the first round of voting, and admitted that she is “of course concerned.”

“I certainly tried [during my term] and I got results, so why did I fail to get through to so many of you? It means I did something wrong myself. I took my eye off the ball somewhere,” Orlova says in the video, asking for support in the next round of voting. If she wins, Orlova promises to consult the public on “all the most important steps” through a project she’s calling “People’s Solution,” which she wants to launch after her reelection.

• On September 9, Orlova won just 36.42 percent of the vote, narrowly outperforming LDPR opposition candidate Vladimir Sipyagin, who finished with 31.19 percent. The two will face off in a runoff election this Sunday, on September 23, when Khakassia and Khabarovsk will also hold second-round gubernatorial elections.

Opinion commentary 💭

🤦‍♂️ Trudolyubov on Russia’s “series of unfortunate events”

In an op-ed for Republic on September 18, touching on a theme that recently led Oleg Kashin to speculate about a far-reaching conspiracy by a hard-liner “junta,” columnist Maxim Trudolyubov addressed the growing number of foreign and domestic mistakes by Russian officials over the past few weeks. Unlike Kashin, Trudolyubov argues that the new “critical mass of failures” isn’t some orchestrated plot, but the unscripted, inevitable consequence of Vladimir Putin’s refusal to take responsibility for his own mistakes. This penchant for blaming others (foreign and domestic, weak and strong) is also what endeared Putin to Russians at the end of the Yeltsin era, Trudolyubov says. Putin offered the country an escape from painful reforms and social changes, turning the “public discussion” from a confrontation with past mistakes to anger about the West’s disrespect.

Trudolyubov thinks there are likely two ways Russia’s current “series of unfortunate events” will unfold: (1) Putin (or whoever is able to blame Putin for everything) will move the country even further into authoritarianism (banning more things, closing borders, or locking up someone new), or (2) Russian society will “mature” enough to realize that the only link between the latest failures is the government’s incompetence.

💸 Glandin and Imennov on how the Internet dooms oligarchs to sanctions

In an article for Carnegie Moscow Center, Sergey Glandin and Anton Imennov address the next wave of U.S. sanctions against Russians expected in November, following Donald Trump’s recent executive order authorizing sanctions against foreigners accused of trying to meddle in American elections. The article focuses on the information cited by the Office of Foreign Assets Control as grounds for sanctioning Oleg Deripaska on April 6, concluding that much of the data was pulled from open-source queries on Google.

Glandin and Imennov offer the following three reflections: (1) any information available publicly that oligarchs haven’t expunged from the Web through lawsuits (in reputable courts) will come back to bite them, and the Internet is now more damaging than the traditional news media; (2) tycoons who make their fortunes through special Kremlin ties and public displays of loyalty to the regime should expect to be vulnerable to sanctions; and (3) Deripaska isn’t alone, and his case shows that no amount of informal personal ties in the West will save oligarchs from the new “transparent unified rules of the game.”