Yabloko proposes ‘Plan B’ after being barred from State Duma election — spoil the party-list ballot
The Yabloko party has unveiled its strategy for this month’s State Duma election, urging voters to skip remote voting and cast ballots in person on September 20, then deliberately spoil them in the party-list vote.
A ballot is declared invalid only if marks appear in more than one box. Leaving it blank isn’t enough, Yabloko warns: “the risk remains that someone else will do it in your place.”
This applies to non-parliamentary parties as well. They are spoiler parties that are no different in principle from the parliamentary ones. It was specifically representatives of non-parliamentary parties who were used in this campaign to file lawsuits seeking to remove Yabloko’s candidates and lists from the federal and regional elections.
Yabloko calls the strategy a “plan of conscience, peace, and civic responsibility” and recommends the same approach for single-mandate district races, unless a Yabloko candidate is on the ballot there.
The party stated its goal is to win as many single-mandate seats in the State Duma as possible, get its party lists into the legislative assemblies of the Novgorod and Tomsk regions, and capture single-mandate seats in the legislative assemblies of St. Petersburg, Karelia, and the Sverdlovsk, Pskov, Novgorod, and Kaliningrad regions.
Russia’s Supreme Court removed Yabloko’s federal party list from the State Duma election, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, in early August, after the Rodina party sued, accusing Yabloko of copyright violations and illegal payments for campaign advertising. Yabloko was also barred from regional elections in several regions.
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