Translated material
Criminal investigation
So, who can falsify the results of the Russian presidential elections? On a national scale - the Central Election Commission. On the scale of individual territories - territorial election commissions of different levels. Can employees of local election commissions and the Central Election Commission take such a step without direct or indirect instructions from the current executive branch? Of course not. Agree, it is impossible to imagine a situation in which the results of the presidential election in our country will be distorted in favor of any opposition candidate. If falsification even happens, then one can imagine that the votes will be attributed to the one who is usually labeled as “successor”. Or they will take votes from his opponents - for example, so that the “successor” wins in the first round. But since the election results, even theoretically, can be rigged exclusively in favor of the current government, then only it can be the customer of such a procedure.
Is it possible to imagine that our court will satisfy the claim of the losers (the winners of the voting results never challenge) and recognize the election results as fraudulent? You understand that any fantasy must have limits. This is possible within one or two districts, and only if the violations are considered minor and do not affect the overall election results. Throughout the country, the current judiciary will never recognize the results of the presidential elections as fraudulent. According to Mr. Semigin’s bill, this would mean recognition by the state authorities of their own particularly serious crime based on the punishment for it up to 15 years in prison.
Then the next question is: why legally introduce a punishment that cannot be applied in principle and even the abstract presence of which is not able to influence potential “criminals”? The question is rhetorical. Of course, you can arrange a show trial by recognizing the election results of some head of the village administration as false and imprisoning the head of a small election commission far from the capital. But such a measure does not eliminate the conditions for election fraud. And the problem is precisely that our political system creates such conditions.
The transformation of political parties into projects of the executive branch, the use of national mass media, especially television, for state propaganda, new electoral legislation, the purpose of which is to minimize the risk of criticism of the current government during election campaigns and the risk of defeat of the government during elections - the inevitable context of the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections. In such conditions, actual falsification of the election results will be, for example, restricting the access of real opposition forces to them. Or the use of television in such a way that a clear advantage will be given to the “right” candidates. Therefore, it is absolutely not necessary to resort to falsification during the counting of votes - the problem can be solved more elegantly and much earlier, even before the voting itself.
All of the above, of course, does not mean that in the main elections in the immediate future of Russia, the one whom the Kremlin corridors would like to see as president (when they agree on a single candidate) is not able to win without fraud with the votes. Even most likely capable. It’s just that the current political system has discredited the electoral process itself in advance. So the elections may be legal, but not fair.
By the way, this is precisely why both the government and the opposition in the framework of both federal election campaigns - Duma and presidential - will talk about the need for fair elections. This slogan will allow the authorities to create the appearance of democracy, while the opposition will attribute the defeat to “dishonest” elections. In democratic, rather than “sovereign-democratic” countries, the losers, of course, also often claim that their victory was stolen from them and challenge the voting results in the courts. But there it cannot occur to the court to make a decision under pressure from the executive branch, and the executive branch cannot interfere in the course of the judicial process. In Russia, the only elections on which something else depends are, in principle, beyond the jurisdiction. Because the authors of the rules of the game, the players and the referees are the same officials. And the proposal of Deputy Semigin, although it reflects fears of the reality of falsification of the results of any elections, in no way reduces the threat of such a development of events.