Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 5 – The process
by which a government draws the electoral map in such a way that the number of
its opponents in parliament will be minimized, long known in the West as “gerrymandering,”
has now come to Russia in a big way and
is being employed by Moscow for exactly the same purposes.
But perhaps not unexpectedly, “dzherimendering”
is being used more bluntly and brutally than in the West with the authorities
announcing one map and then changing it at the last minute to keep any opposition
groups from being able to decide whom to nominate or how best to compete
against pro-government parties.
On Polit.ru yesterday, journalist Ilya
Karpyuk reports that Russia’s Central Electoral Commission has announced that
it will draw up by next summer the map of the 225 single-member districts in
the Russian Federation from which half of the next Duma will be elected in 2016
(polit.ru/article/2014/12/04/okrug/).
According
to Russian law, each district is supposed to contain roughly the same number of
voters, which as of now would be approximately 498,000, but because each
federal subject has to have at least one such district even if its population
is much smaller than that. Thus, Chukotka with only 35,000 voters nonetheless
gets a representative.
Those with more get additional
deputies or are combined with others, including voters from abroad, to determine
the number, Karpyuk says, noting that “all these rules could be applied even
without the Central Election Commission since all the necessary data are
published in open sources (cikrf.ru/izbiratel/quantity/010814.html).
But
he points out, “the work of the CEC does not consist in the composition of a
simple electronic table.” Instead, it is directly involved in the drawing of
electoral districts within regions, and it is there that “dzherimendering”
really happens – and with little supervision from above despite the requirement
that the Duma confirm the final map.
“As
a rule,” he says, “supporters of the opposition are one way or another grouped
according to a geographical principle. In Moscow, for example, liberal parties
and candidates always receive a higher percentage in the center, in the
southwest along Lenin Avenue, and in the northwest along Leningrad Avenue.”
Consequently,
the CEC “needs either to include the maximum number of opposition voters in a
minimum number of electoral districts so that only several unsuitable
candidates will make it to parliament or ‘spread’ opposition voters among other
districts so that they will not be able to secure a majority for their
candidates.”
“In
fact,” Karpyuk says, “gerrymandering is a legalized administrative resource,”
one in which the authorities can follow the law but nonetheless set things up
in such a way that they will ensure that representatives of the party of power
are re-elected and that those of the opposition have little chance to gain
seats.
And
in exercising these “legal” rights, the authorities behave in ways that have
largely been eliminated in other democracies where the power of the courts has
set limits on gerrymandering activities. Thus, in Russia, officials announce
one electoral map and then change it shortly before the voting.
That
happened in the run-up to elections for the Moscow City Duma, and it means that
opposition groups were uncertain whom they should nominate and where they
should make the greatest effort. Indeed, some opposition figures “explained
their poor results” in those elections by saying that they “weren’t able to
prepare for the campaign” because of these map changes.
It
cannot be excluded, some like Vadim Soloyev, a member of the KPRF central
committee says, that the authorities will once again adopt a map they have no
intention of using and then change it.
That is even more likely if the deteriorating Russian economy forces the
government to call elections early.
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