Through obstacles

On October 20, elections to the Coordination Council (CC) of the Russian opposition began, which will last until the end of the day on October 21. As the organizers predicted, participants in online voting (and all elections, including offline polls, take place only on the Internet) faced DDoS attacks. There were reports that the Central Election Committee (CEC) website cvk2012.org was not opening, and that registered voters could not pass the verification required to vote online. At the moment, other online voting platforms are not opening - democratia2.ru and grakon.org.

More than 165 thousand people are registered voters. According to the Chairman of the Central Election Commission Leonid Volkov, by eight in the morning 8.5 thousand people had already voted in Moscow.

There will also be an opportunity to vote in Moscow during the rally on Trubnaya, which began at 12.00. Police forces have been deployed there. Previously, the Moscow authorities warned the organizers and participants of the rally that they would evaluate their actions if the rally changed the topic - this was due to the fact that after investigative actions against the coordinator of the Left Front Sergei Udaltsov, his assistant Konstantin Lebedev and the assistant to the Duma deputy from A Just Russia Leonid Razvozzhaev made statements that the rally would be dedicated to political prisoners.

The organizers considered the visit of representatives of the pro-Kremlin youth movement “Nashi”, who had previously stated that they would observe the elections, to be another obstacle to voting. Volkov wrote in his blog: “The Nashi scum Goloskokov came to the Central Exhibition Complex and was thrown down the stairs” (we are talking about Nashi commissar Konstantin Goloskokov, who has been especially active lately). On Twitter, Volkov also published a photo of an explanatory note for an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that a certain unkempt young man unknown to him came to his office in Yekaterinburg, who tried to break into a room where he had no right to be, and that Volkov had to call security to send out.

Volkov also reported that FSB officers came to the regional election committee (REC) in Chelyabinsk and began a search on the basis that one of the committee members was suspected of participation in Muslim extremist organizations. It should be added that anti-extremist activity is very active in Chelyabinsk - literally every day representatives of banned Muslim organizations are caught there.

Meanwhile, there are reports that there are problems with the Internet on Trubnaya Square. In addition, both organizers and bloggers ask everyone who is going to Trubnaya to take computers with them to verify voters. In any case, the voting sites are still there. Representatives of the Central Military Commission previously claimed that they had installed protection, but apparently it did not help.

Let us remind you that voters will have to elect 30 people to the council from the general civic list and five people each from the lists of leftists, liberals and nationalists.

Earlier, ten candidates for the Constitutional Court, as well as Ilya Ponomarev, who withdrew his candidacy, issued a statement, which said, in particular: “If for some reason a significant part of those who came to the rallies on October 20 and 21 are unable to vote, we We consider it necessary to extend offline voting for a period sufficient for everyone to take part in it. Otherwise, it will be impossible to consider the results of these elections as a real expression of the will of the democratic movement.” Ponomarev believes that the opposition has shown its immaturity. Meanwhile, his name still appears on the list of candidates, which the deputy considers rudeness.