Referendum Vote Allowing Kremlin to Rewrite Rules for All Future Russian Elections, Pertsev Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, June 30 – Invoking the coronavirus pandemic as an explanation for its moves, the Kremlin has rewritten the rules not only for tomorrow’s vote but almost certainly for all future Russian elections, giving the powers even greater possibilities of controlling outcomes, gelding the opposition, and reducing the legitimacy of all results, Andrey Pertsev says.

In a commentary for Carnegie’s Moscow Center, the Kommersant journalist says the pandemic provided a cover for extending voting over the course of a week, thus making serious monitoring impossible and opening the way for the authorities to bus their people in and offer prizes to them (carnegie.ru/commentary/82204).

In this way, Pertsev says, “the Presidential Administration created ideal conditions to correct the result in any way necessary and even to make it up entirely arbitrarily.”  All the steps it took for the plebiscite, it has taken before but only in limited and regional ways. Now, it has pulled out all the stops and will no doubt view this approach as the only correct one in the future. 

            Internet posts show Russians have already seen through this and are thus likely to see any election results as even more meaningless in the future than they have been earlier in Putin’s rule.  And one key indication that the regime plans to continue to use the new rules is it has stopped invoking the pandemic as an excuse and instead described all this as “a convenience.”

            And that creates a new set of problems for the regime: the population will assume that all elections are fraudulent and won’t need proof. If they protest this as they likely will – indeed, this new system virtually guarantees that outcome -- the regime will have little choice but to use repression, further compromising both the electoral process and its own legitimacy.