“There was a raider takeover of the city”

On March 31, elections were held for the mayor of the city of Zhukovsky near Moscow. Colonel Andrei Voytyuk, who was supported by the ruling party, won. His main rival, businessman and candidate from Mikhail Prokhorov's Civic Platform party, Igor Novikov, filed a lawsuit on April 4 demanding that the election results be cancelled.

I submitted 50 complaints to the local territorial election commission (TEC), but none of them was accepted. None! I decided to go to court. And I believe that we have every reason to cancel the results of these elections. What did we state in the claim? Our main complaint is the phenomenal, brazen voter buying.

It started two weeks before the voting day at the headquarters of one of the candidates - Sergei Troitsky (Spider), the leader of the rock group Metal Corrosion. People came to the headquarters of the Spider, where an "agitator's contract" was drawn up, in these contracts they indicated their addresses and passport data. For the conclusion of such an agreement paid 500 rubles. From March 29, that is, three days before the elections, members of the Spider headquarters began to go around the apartments and give out instructions - they say that the strategy has changed, you need to vote not for Spider, but for the candidate from the government, Voytyuk. And they even gave them special certificates of propagandists - cards with the name of Voytyuk and his incorrect initials, so that nothing could be proved later. In order to “cash out” a campaign card, at the exit from the polling station, one had to approach a special person with a red armband, who allegedly conducted an exit poll. He punched the agitator's ID with a hole punch in the shape of a butterfly - with such a mark one could apply to specially organized points for issuing money. There they were paid another 1000 rubles.

In our lawsuit, we also wrote about the inactivity of law enforcement agencies, which saw illegal campaigning, knew about it, but did not stop it. According to professional observers and lawyers, between 1,500 and 3,000 voters were bribed to vote for Voytyuk. Since the gap in the number of votes between us and the winning candidate is just about 3,000 votes, it is obvious to us that these violations significantly affected the election results. And we will prove it in court.

I fear for the fate of Zhukovsky and doubt that with a mayor elected in this way, he will be able to develop as a science city. There are other concerns: an important person in Voytyuk's team is Andrey Vikharev, deputy of the council of deputies of Zhukovsky, a businessman who owns the Garantiya-Stroy construction company. He has a bad reputation in the city - they say he is connected with the construction mafia. It is this person who is now responsible for the formation of the team of the new mayor. So this whole story is more like a raider seizure of the city of Zhukovsky than an election.