Lies are like work

On March 14, the Constitutional Court began to consider the question of whether voters can appeal the election results in courts or not. Hearings will last for several weeks. Physicist and blogger Andrey Zayakin (aka Doctor Z) is one of the applicants who applied to the country's highest court.

The essence of the issue that was discussed at the first meeting on the complaint to the Constitutional Court: to what stage of the elections does active suffrage extend, does it include the right to a correct count of votes? Another question, no less important, is about the territorial limits that the defendant's representatives are trying to impose. The applicants have argued, and successfully, that active suffrage is tied not to a particular polling station, but to an electoral district. This is important because there is one federal district in the parliamentary and presidential elections, and we have more than 90 thousand polling stations. And if my vote is correctly counted in the polling station where I voted, then due to falsifications in another in Nakhodka or Kaliningrad, the result will be false: the winner is by no means the person who received the most votes, and my vote will be thrown into the trash heap.

The applicants said: The Constitution of the Russian Federation primarily protects the rights of citizens. There is no such thing as the right of parties. And if we are talking about elections to the State Duma, then from the interpretation of the law, which was proposed by existing practice and supported in court by the defendant, it follows that the right of parties that can appeal any violations in the elections in courts has priority over the right of citizens endowed with an active electoral right. This is nonsense.

The defendants tried to convince us: “You, the voters, are nobody! You cannot contest the results of an election because you cannot prove that your particular ballot was counted incorrectly. The elections are secret, therefore, there is no way to prove that you voted for party X.”

The arguments of the defendants struck me with their fantastic cynicism. Here are some of them. First, if every voter in every part of the country files lawsuits, the courts will be flooded with lawsuits and we will go bankrupt in legal fees. Secondly, the task of the applicants and everyone who is fighting for their electoral rights is the political destabilization of the country. Further: why did citizen Zayakin, who lives in Spain, file two hundred lawsuits about various facts known from the Internet? And anyway, where do they all climb! In short, this action was worthy of the pen of Saltykov-Shchedrin or Pelevin. In terms of cynicism, we have slipped almost to the Stalinist trials. The speeches of the defendants - representatives of the president, the Federation Council and the State Duma - are completely Kafkaesque. These people stubbornly call black - white, white - black, sheer phantasmagoria! With one of them - Dmitry Vyatkin, a State Duma deputy from United Russia - it was extremely curious to talk after the trial. The fact is that in the dissertation of this comrade I found about four pages of incorrect borrowings, which I wrote about on my blog. After the meeting, he himself approached me and asked me to deal with the essence of the accusations against him of plagiarism. His explanations: these are technical errors - I forgot to put quotes, I scanned the text incorrectly, and so on: I am now waiting for a draft from him to make sure that the whole thing is in the lost quotes. And then one of my colleagues asked Mr. Vyatkin: “Why are you — in the sense of representatives of the Presidential Administration, the State Duma — here, at the meeting, carrying this nonsense?” Mr. Vyatkin replied: "Well, understand, this is my job." It was more than an eloquent answer. Because when a person, instead of answering: “This is my position, I agree with it”, answers: “This is my job”, then this is reminiscent of how the Nazi executioners in Nuremberg justified themselves: “It was our job to kill Jews, gypsies ... Similarly, Deputy Vyatkin said, "This is my job." I would very much like the democratic community to remember these words and someday, when all these deputies will be lustrated, to remember that this person said: "This is my job."

In general, the meeting in the Constitutional Court was a very instructive and important experience. The experience of how civil society can still try to at least bring to justice those who stole 11 million votes from us.