#russian sham elections

[odinsblog]

RUSSIA’S SHAM ELECTIONS, where people are “helped” by armed soldiers who check to ensure they vote correctly—or else.

Does this look like they are helping to conduct a fair, peaceful and democratic election process? Or does it look like repressed voters under duress, who are being forced to vote for Putin under threat of armed Russian soldiers? (source) (source) (source)

[blueiskewl]

2024 Russia Presidential Election

An elderly Russian voter being 'encouraged' to vote for Vladimir Putin.

This sums up Russian democracy perfectly.

[russianreader]

Elections Wrap-Up

Photo by Alexandra Astakhova Voting in prison is not a bad form of entertainment. Dozens of prisoners are escorted to the ballot boxes simultaneously, providing a rare opportunity to chat and exchange news with your neighbors. We were assembled in the “gully” and launched in pairs into a room equipped for a polling station. The convicts had fun arguing who to vote for. Mostly, of course, there…

[loving-n0t-heyting]

the idea that the Germans overwhelmingly supported the nazis is a perversely fascinating tool of propaganda tbh bc it was and is used by so many people with different goals and in different ways. The nazis obv just tried to legitimize themselves by faking the results of eg the 1934 referendum; the various German governments of the post-war period in turn use this referendum to show that referendums are bad and everything should be left up to qualified politicians bc the people would just elect another Hitler (who was, in fact, empowered primarily by so-called qualified politicians). Various far-right groups uphold it to claim that modern democracy is a sham. The allies used it to tell theri soldiers "see? They chose this! You can kill them without second thought, men, women, and children, and it's totally justified bc they unanimously stand behind their dictator", and lastly (afaik, at least) there's the cult of guilt in Germany as well as internationally condemning every German who was born after the whole thing as guilty by association. Like practically zero people of influence have any interest at all in being honest about this, and if you do, somehow, it's nazi apologia to say that the NSDAP were oppressors who did not care about what the population actually wanted.

If you for some reason are in need of upping yr blood pressure you can try reading this obscene Jason stanley article in which inherent german blood guilt for Hitler is used to justify treating all future generations of Russians as analogously guilty of the invasion of ukraine by way of their national identity

Even so, my first thought when meeting another German is that their grandparents most likely would have enthusiastically supported murdering me and my family. […] [T]here is still fear and shame in their eyes whenever they attempt to steer the conversation away from their country’s dark legacy. There always will be, because genocide will not and cannot be forgotten – ever.

Imagine just saying this, in print, on purpose! I cannot, as the saying goes, fucking even

[argumate]

have to think it's better for a country to have sham elections than no elections because the superficial endorsement of the democratic process, even if regularly undermined in practice, allows a relatively smooth transition to actual democratic accountability just by doing less suppression of political opposition over time, without needing to arrange any major shifts in ideological direction.

for example Putin might be an autocratic leader who ensures that he faces no effective opposition in his sloppily managed elections, but notionally at least it would be possible (after his demise) for stronger candidates to run actual campaigns without any official change to the Russian political process, which ostensibly already supports multi-party democratic elections.

[saddayfordemocracy]

Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny (4 June 1976 – 16 February 2024)

Mr Navalny was a Russian opposition leader, lawyer, anti-corruption activist, and political prisoner.

He organised anti-government demonstrations and ran for office to advocate reforms against corruption in Russia and against Dictator Vladimir Putin and his government.

Mr Navalny was founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). He was recognised by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience, and was awarded the Sakharov Prize for his work on human rights.

Through his social media channels, Mr Navalny and his team published material about corruption in Russia, organised political demonstrations and promoted his campaigns. In a 2011 radio interview, he described Russia's ruling party, United Russia, as a "party of crooks and thieves", which became a popular epithet.

Mr Navalny and the FBK have published investigations detailing alleged corruption by high-ranking Russian officials and their associates. He twice received a suspended sentence for embezzlement, in 2013 and 2014. Both criminal cases were widely considered politically motivated and intended to bar him from running in future elections. He ran in the 2013 Moscow mayoral election and came in second with 27% of the vote but was barred from running in the 2018 presidential election.

In August 2020, Mr Navalny was hospitalised in serious condition after being poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent. He was medically evacuated to Berlin and discharged a month later. He accused Putin of being responsible for his poisoning, and an investigation implicated agents from the Federal Security Service.

In January 2021, Mr Navalny returned to Russia and was immediately detained on accusations of violating parole conditions while he was hospitalised in Germany. Following his arrest, mass protests were held across Russia. In February 2021, his suspended sentence was replaced with a prison sentence of over 2+1⁄2 years' detention, and his organisations were later designated as extremist and liquidated.

In March 2022, Mr Navalny was sentenced to an additional nine years in prison after being found guilty of embezzlement and contempt of court in a new trial described as a sham by Amnesty International; his appeal was rejected and in June, he was transferred to a high-security prison.

In August 2023, Mr Navalny was sentenced to an additional 19 years in prison on extremism charges.

In December 2023, Navalny went missing from prison for almost three weeks. He re-emerged in an Arctic Circle corrective colony in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

On 16 February 2024, the Russian prison service reported that Mr Navalny had died at the age of 47. His death sparked protests, both in Russia and in various other countries. Accusations against the Russian authorities in connection with his death have been made by many Western governments and international organisations.

Rest in Power !

Lyudmila Navalnaya, the mother of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, attends a funeral service and a farewell ceremony for her son at the Soothe My Sorrows church in Moscow, Russia, March 1.

People attach a banner to a tree near the Borisovskoye cemetery after the funeral of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, in Moscow, Russia, March 1. A slogan on the banner refers to Russian President Vladimir Putin and reads: "Putin killed him but didn't break (his spirit)"

People walk towards the Borisovskoye cemetery during the funeral of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny in Moscow, Russia, March 1, 2024. A placard reads: "We remember, we love, we won't forget". 

People walk towards Soothe My Sorrows church in Moscow, Russia and Borisovskoye cemetery during the funeral of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny in Moscow, Russia, March 1.

Courtesy: REUTERS/Stringer

[ohsalome]

I just saw post about next voting in usa and how they should threaten democrats to not vote unless Biden calls for ceasefire and like .....the only thing that you guys threaten with this is everyone's lives. Everyone loosing their minds over Biden so much, but how many actually went and read up on things that Trump openly says he wants to do in his next presidency or that he's buddies with Netanyahu. Americans say they want drastic changes in their country, but only if they can do it comfortably by making 1min videos on tiktok or writing on other social media platforms, can't be bothered with protests on big scale. Perfect enviroment for Trump's campaign, doesn't have to do anything really, the left will do it for him.

You know what this reminds me of? russians. Whichever year it was, and their elections are sham anyways, but it was a country succumbing into fascism and the youth was making fun of opposition and the very concept of participating in the political life at all.

Timothy Snyder characterised the current war as war between democracy and authoritarianism. Worldwide, so far, authoritariarism wins. And it wins with the hands of people like these.

[odinsblog]

There was no election in Russia.

There was no campaign.

There were no debates, which was unsurprising, because no issues could be debated.

Above all, there were no real candidates, bar one: the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the man who has just started his fifth, unconstitutional term in office.

Russians did line up at polling stations, but these were not actually polling stations. They were props in an elaborate piece of political theater, a months-long exercise in the projection of power and brutality.

While that exercise unfolded, Putin’s only significant political opponent, Alexei Navalny, died under mysterious circumstances in a prison north of the Arctic Circle. Two Russian presidential candidates collected the requisite number of signatures to stand, both said they opposed the war in Ukraine, and both were removed from the ballot.

Three practically unknown people were allowed to remain on the ballot, but they did not criticize Putin and did not oppose him in any way. One of them declared that he hoped Putin would win. In Russian-occupied Ukraine, men in balaclavas forced people to vote at gunpoint.

Some Western media nevertheless covered this orchestrated drama as if it really were an election. Reporters interviewed voters, cited “exit polls,” even commented on the “results,” as if these things mean anything in a country whose leadership lies openly about everything: economic statistics, war casualties, Russian history. Reuters ran a headline declaring Putin had won “in a landslide.” The earnest coverage was exactly what Putin hoped he would get. He knows, after all, that he is an illegitimate leader, and he knows that he abandoned the Russian constitution.

This non-election was his messaging exercise, designed to show Russians, and the rest of the world, that he intends to stay in power anyway, illegally.

(continue reading)

[blueiskewl]

2024 Russia Presidential Election

A Russian election worker makes sure that the voters don’t accidentally vote for the wrong presidential candidate.

Vladimir Putin 're-elected' for another 6 years in power with 87% of the 'votes'.

[tomorrowusa]

Living in a police state means you're governed by criminals who ignore threats to public safety.

It turns out that the four terror suspects were from Tajikistan though living in Russia. This is essentially an internal matter. Putin's secret police were too busy murdering political opponents and harassing dissidents to be concerned about the threat of terrorism from within.

Moscow terror attack: Russian massacre suspects’ homeland Tajikistan is plagued by poverty and religious strife

Putin buddy Emomali Rahmon is Tajikistan's kleptocratic “Leader of the Nation” – essentially dictator for life. Like Russia, the country is undemocratic but holds sham elections for window dressing.

The pro-democracy organization Freedom House lists Tajikistan as a Consolidated Authoritarian Regime. It's a place only a dictator would love.

Tajikistan: Nations in Transit 2023 Country Report | Freedom House

[russianreader]

New Blood

Professor Ryan mentions the events of May 13, 1985. On that day, about 500 police officers arrived at a row house at 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia to serve arrest warrants against several members of the militant black anarcho-primitivist group MOVE which has been called a terrorist organization by city officials and which had been in conflict with neighbors. After refusing to surrender…

[mariacallous]

EARLY VOTING in Mariupol began on March 10th, courtesy of armed election brigades who criss-crossed the city in search of participants. Sometimes, mobile ballot boxes were unveiled to the sounds of rousing hits such as Sergei Voitenko’s “My Russia” (Russia! Russia! My Russia! / Great country! Motherland!). Other times, guns did the talking. Those preferring to wait until the official start had a harder job. The locations of polling booths were not advertised ahead of the vote—a provision, officials explained, designed to ensure the safety of organisers. By the time polls closed on the evening of March 15th, the first of the three official ballot days, a stratospheric 69% of the region had already voted. This was all the more remarkable given the absence of accurate voting lists to calculate the number from.

The vote in Mariupol could be written off as a farce, were it not for everything that went before it. The second day of voting came exactly two years after Russian planes dropped bombs on the city’s main theatre while a large number of children were taking shelter inside, killing hundreds of them. Local authorities estimate that at least 22,000 civilians were killed in the city during weeks of bombardment. It may be considerably more. Only 120,000 of a pre-war population of 450,000 remain in Mariupol, plus a similar number of new migrants from Russia and central Asia.

Local sources, whose identities we are withholding for their protection, report that Mariupol has been unusually deserted over the days of the vote. The city still bears obvious war scars, they say. Central streets alternate between ruins and, where houses have been cleared, empty pits. Only collaborators who have proven their worth to the occupying Russian forces have been given homes in the few new-builds, hastily constructed for the cameras on the edge of the city. Access to the city is still tightly controlled, with checkpoints on the roads in and out. Anyone wanting to enter has to get permission at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, 1,000 km away.

The Kremlin has been nonetheless keen for Mariupol to display loyalty. One of the very first acts of the occupying forces—even before the theatre was filled in with concrete in an attempt to contain the stench of rotting corpses—was to wheel in massive video screens showing Vladimir Putin. “They hadn’t even opened the shops or the market, or the hospitals, but they had the big propaganda screens,” one local said. In the run-up to the presidential elections, there was a campaign to encourage locals to take up Russian passports. Its lack of success was perhaps most clearly shown in the decision in December 2023 to allow people to vote using their Ukrainian IDs, a rare example of a state allowing nationals of another one to take part in a presidential election. It is one of many avenues for voting fraud, suggests Mariupol’s elected mayor Vadym Boychenko, now based in Ukrainian-controlled Dnipro.

Solomiia Bobrovska, a member of Ukraine’s parliamentary intelligence committee closely connected to resistance movements, says that Mariupol remains a partisan hotbed. “That’s why they are so strict about the city. They don’t trust locals with anything important.”

The resistance effort can broadly be split between military and civilian wings. Partisan and diversionary activity in the former category is overseen by agencies like the SSO, Ukraine’s special forces, and HUR, its military intelligence agency. The SBU, the domestic intelligence outift, leads on civilian resistance.

Alongside this are other more independent activist groups, like Yellow Ribbon, which says it has 15,000 activists across Ukraine’s occupied territories. The resistance is mostly low-level: printing anti-Putin posters and organising underground Ukrainian flag production. Its social-media channel offers suggestions about how to avoid voting and share information about election organisers with prosecutors. “It’s about giving people support, to show they are not alone,” says “Alex”, a co-founder of the movement. “Our aim is to irritate the hell out of the Kremlin.”

Civil and military representatives are hesitant to discuss the extent of their networks, but it’s clear that their work has become much more difficult since the early days of the war. Many agents have been compromised, hauled off to prison in the best case scenarios. Russia has dispatched tens of thousands of security officers to the occupied territories. Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, also in exile, admits the resistance was “losing too many people,” and suggests Ukraine should become more careful. He suggests encouraging locals to vote unless it was safe not to do so; a boycott was unlikely to change anything and could attract dangerous attention, he says. “The Mariupol resistance is different to everywhere else given our history and the level of control. At this stage we need to think about keeping people alive. They are our stake.”

The Ukrainian government, perhaps surprisingly, has not produced a unified position on what its citizens should do: take part in the electoral farce to avoid reprisals, or ignore it. That is partly down to disagreement inside the corridors of power. But it is really because officials find it hard to admit that the liberation of Mariupol now looks remote. For Mr Boychenko, the exiled mayor, who has been criticised for his decision to leave his city in the early days of the war, the focus should be on helping the 200,000 or so survivors now scattered across Ukraine. “We are an evacuated city, a people in exile. But we haven’t disappeared.”

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

putin: [keeps winning the election with some insanely high number of votes]

the left: HES A DICTATOR WHO FORGES IT

putin: [shows a results of the referendum that say people of donetsk and luhansk want to join russia]

the left: THIS IS A COMPLETE SHAM

putin: [puts out a statistic of russia having low spread of corona]

the left: HES JUST TRYING TO SELL SPUTNIK TO OTHER COUNTRIES

putin: [says that most russians support the invasion of ukraine]

the left: ...i dont see why this man would lie.

Reality for the left is very malleable

[sev-wildfang]

american media is like "Russia's PHONY SHAM elections" or "China's MOCKERY of freedom" and then pretend theres anything materially different (as in "better") depending on the outcome of a US presidential election

(man i fucking WISH the russians were paying me for this, i could use the money lol)