Party of Power Worked Hard to Ensure September 9 Results Were Not Even Worse, Shpilkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 10 – The failures of United Russia on September 9 have attracted the most attention, Sergey Shpilkin says; but in fact, the party of power, chastened by its defeats in three gubernatorial elections a year ago, adopted a large number of strategies to prevent the results for itself from being even worse than they were.

            In a Novaya gazeta commentary, Shpilkin says that “having suffered a psychological trauma a year ago,” something it did not expect, the party of power has taken steps over the intervening months to ensure that it would elect more of its candidates than otherwise would have been the case (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2019/09/10/81915-urnoterapiya).

            Describing this effort as “voting urn therapy,” the Moscow commentator says that the powers that be adopted a variety of tactics all of which were designed to improve its showing. First of all, it talked the three parties of the systemic opposition from not running gubernatorial candidates even n places where they were traditionally strongest.

            Second, it used the municipal filter ruthlessly to exclude independent opposition parties, even as it pushed through laws allowing United Russia candidates to run as independents so as to avoid the toxic consequences of having to identify with the largely discredited and extremely unpopular United Russia. 

            And third, in various ways, it set the stage for falsifications of various sorts designed to aid its preferred candidates.  According to experts, Shpilkin says, there was significant falsification for United Russia in ten of the 13 regions where elections were held in addition to Khabarovsk, Sevastopol and Moscow.

            However, “even this didn’t help: “according to political analyst Grigory Golosov, in comparison with previous elections, the result for United Russia fell on average by 16 percentage points.” But it helped enough to keep defeat from being a disaster as did the fact that so many United Russia candidates ran independently of the party.

            The Kremlin’s transparent attempt to control the outcome of elections by limiting who could be a candidate sparked the mass demonstrations in Moscow and “created a favorable basis for Aleksey Navalny’s ‘smart voting’ project.” It was a major success in Moscow and did better than many acknowledge elsewhere.

             And Shpilkin concludes by pointing to yet another tactic the authorities used to push up reported results for United Russia and in Moscow itself: They introduced electronic voting in several parts of the city, and in every case where that technique was used, United Russia received a higher percentage than it did elsewhere.