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Released
Krasnoyarsk police joined the party campaign
The Union of Right Forces has become a victim of the authorities’ uncompromising struggle for clean elections : in several regions of the country, copies of the party’s propaganda materials have been seized. The Central Election Commission left the right-wing complaint related to this unsatisfied yesterday.As CEC member Maya Grishina reported, the distribution of SSP propaganda newspapers called “Problem No. 1” began in Krasnoyarsk on October 24. However, a copy of the campaign materials was presented to the regional election commission only the next day, October 25, and this violates paragraph 5 of Article 61 of the Law “On Elections,” which requires that the materials of the election commission be shown first, and only then distributed. The intrigue is that this violation was discovered not by the regional election commission, but by local authorities of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate, who, without thinking twice, seized the entire circulation that seemed suspicious to them - 650 thousand copies. Only after this, local fighters for the purity of the electoral process, having come to their senses, turned to the police with a belated request to investigate the case. And the local branch of the party in response tried to resort to the intercession of the Central Election Commission.
The representative of the Union of Right Forces in the Central Election Commission, Vadim Prokhorov, insisted that the party members could not have distributed “Problem No. 1” in any way, since the circulation was not received from the printing house. Because of this, even a sample of leaflets had to be sent electronically to the regional election commission. Moreover, as it turned out, the valiant police identified only four propaganda messages distributed ahead of schedule. Some vigilant citizens seem to have found them in their mailboxes.
During the investigation, it also became clear that when printing the propaganda, the declared circulation was exceeded by as much as 1,200 pieces. Party members claimed that this was the 0.2% “for defects” provided by the printing house, and promised to put the extra packs under the knife.
Some members of the Central Election Commission stood up for the offended right-wingers. “This is a serious and very dangerous precedent; soon the police will control the election process,” worried Elena Dubrovina, who called on her colleagues to vote for the return of the selected publications to the Union of Right Forces. To this, the representative of the Krasnoyarsk Electoral Commission, Alina Aliyeva, replied that the party has a second circulation of “Problem No. 1” for campaigning - 1 million 825 thousand copies. However, she immediately made a reservation that the Central Internal Affairs Directorate “has been given an order to detain these materials as well” until the circumstances are clarified. Hearing this, Vadim Prokhorov did not fail to complain about the unjustified seizure of circulation in the Omsk, Kirov and Moscow regions, as well as in Perm and at the entrance to the capital.
However, after heated discussions, the Central Election Commission members decided to comply with the letter of the law, that is, not do anything. As CEC member Gennady Raikov pointed out to his colleagues, the Krasnoyarsk Election Commission had the right to contact the police, so let them sort it out. The chairman of the Krasnoyarsk regional branch of the Union of Right Forces, Vladislav Korolev, who heads the regional party list, intends to complain to the court. However, even in the event of a quick and positive outcome of the case, the beginning of the SPS propaganda campaign has already been virtually crushed.
Why the Krasnoyarsk City Internal Affairs Directorate decided to seize “Problem No. 1” so zealously is unknown. It is possible that inertia worked: in the summer a propaganda booklet with a similar name appeared on behalf of the Union of Right Forces, but then the leader of the party list, Nikita Belykh, publicly disowned these materials. In addition, the leaflets contained an article about allegedly inflated prices and impolite service at the Smolensky grocery store, a member of the board of directors of which is United Russia deputy Vladimir Gruzdev, whom the ruling party is going to make a space tourist. He, according to Ms. Aliyeva, was also going to complain about “the dissemination of information discrediting his honor and business reputation.”
On November 7, the Central Election Commission released information about how much money the parties spent on the election campaign. At yesterday's briefing, commission member Evgeny Kolyushin said that the richest, as one would expect, was United Russia: its funds, including regional ones, received 776 million rubles, of which 187.5 million have been spent so far. The most was spent on today the LDPR, which has spent 276 million rubles. from 382.7 million electoral fund. The rest of the parties are not so “showy”: taking into account the payment of the electoral deposit, none of them have so far spent more than 100 million rubles. In total, as of November 2, the campaign participants had collected 1.7 billion rubles, of which almost a billion were spent together. The main item of expenditure, according to Mr. Kolyushin, is campaigning in the media, primarily on TV.