Russia: Chairman Churov Removed From Russian Central Election Commission | The Moscow Times

Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a new list of the Central Election Commission (CEC) members which did not include the commission’s current chairman Vladimir Churov, the RBC news agency reported Thursday. The decree was posted Thursday by the Kremlin press service and appointed five members — Alexander Kanev, Vasily Likhachev, Ella Pamfilova, Yevgeny Shevchenko, Boris Ebzeev — to the commission. Churov’s position will most likely be given to human rights ombudswoman Ella Pamfilova, according to several unidentified sources of the TASS news agency, RBC reported.

Russia: Opposition rallies in Moscow to demand fair elections | Reuters

Thousands of people rallied on the streets of Moscow on Sunday to demand fair elections and challenge Vladimir Putin’s 15-year-old rule, in the first significant opposition protest in the capital for months. The gathering was restricted by authorities to a district of southern Moscow. Police said no more than 500 took part, while a Reuters witness said there were some 3,000 protesters. “Putin is a bureaucrat, not the czar,” one poster said. Opposition leaders, including anti-Kremlin figurehead Alexei Navalny, said they were protesting against what they called Putin’s “lifelong” rule. “Russia will be free!” Ilya Yashin told the rally. “We will not depart from the country and leave it in the mercy of ‘crooks and thieves’,” he said, referring to a phrase coined by Navalny to describe Russia’s ruling party.

Russia: Opposition Calls for Power Change in Moscow Rally | Bloomberg

Thousands of people gathered in Moscow Sunday evening calling for greater political freedoms and a change to the country’s ruling powers after opposition parties failed to win representation in regional elections this month. Between 8,000 and 10,000 gathered at the rally just outside of the center of the Russian capital, said Leonid Volkov, one of the organizers, by telephone on Sunday. Prior to the rally as many as 8,400 people had registered their interest on Facebook while Moscow authorities gave permission for up to 40,000 demonstrators to congregate. Moscow police press-service said that about 4,000 people turned up. Opposition leader Alexey Navalny called the rally after his party failed to win parliamentary seats in the one region where it was allowed to stand in elections on Sept. 13.

Russia: California hackers attack Kremlin, Putin’s website | Washington Examiner

Hackers in California attacked several of the Russian government’s websites over the weekend, Russian officials said on Monday, just as the country was trying to conduct elections. “Someone attempted to hack our website and alter the data there, making 50,000 requests per minute,” said Vladimir Churov, chairman of the Central Election Commission of Russia, according to a report in the state-funded Russia Today. Such an attack is known as a distributed denial of service, which is designed to crash a website.

Russia: ‘Cruise’ Voting, Mirror Parties, And A Missing Corpse: Spotting Russian Election Abuses | RFE

Russia’s political opposition dispatched a small army of volunteer election observers to keep lookout for voter fraud in Kostroma Oblast, where, having been barred from the ballot everywhere else in the country, the opposition was vying for a small victory in regional elections on September 13. Russian officials quickly touted the Kostroma voting and thousands of other contests across the country as models of “clean elections.” By 11 p.m. on election night, however, independent election-monitoring NGO Golos had clocked 1,736 allegations of election violations, compared to 901 on Russia’s nationwide voting day in 2014 and 747 in 2013. The opposition’s version of events differed sharply from the official version in Kostroma, 350 kilometers northeast of Moscow, where the opposition party Parnas was vying for seats in the regional legislature with activist Ilya Yashin atop its candidate list.

Russia: Russian Local Elections Draw Charges of Fraud | The New York Times

As Russians voted in local and regional elections on Sunday, democracy advocates in the only region where they were allowed to run accused the authorities of fraud and said the police had blockaded an apartment where opposition activists were tracking the vote. Although candidates from President Vladimir V. Putin’s United Russia Party were widely expected to win, Sunday’s vote was being viewed as a dress rehearsal for 2016 parliamentary elections and a test of voter turnout amid an economic downturn and Western sanctions. Results were expected on Monday. In the Kostroma region, about 200 miles northeast of Moscow, a coalition of opposition politicians, including Aleksei A. Navalny, fielded candidates under the banner of Parnas, or People’s Freedom Party. Boris Y. Nemtsov, a political reformer who was shot dead near the Kremlin in February, was the party’s co-founder. Kostroma’s electoral commission granted Parnas approval to run only last month, after several attempts to keep its candidates from running for the regional legislature.

Russia: Regions Prepare to Vote After Campaign of Tricks, Complacency | The Moscow Times

On Sunday, the governors of 21 Russian regions and more than 1,300 heads of small city administrations will be elected, together with deputies for 11 regional parliaments and 25 city legislatures. The nationwide elections, known as unified election day, are considered by some analysts to be a final rehearsal for the State Duma elections in 2016 in which tactics and methods are being tested accordingly. The main question is whether the opposition will be able to gain any ground, but chances are slim, say pundits. “The Kremlin fears elections at all levels,” Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst, told The Moscow Times, commenting on vigorous efforts in some regions to eliminate the opposition at the candidate registration stage. The campaign has seen several tactics employed that have raised eyebrows among political commentators.

Russia: Regional elections show Putin-style democracy in action | Financial Times

Every morning when Svetlana arrives at Susanin Square in the centre of Kostroma, she has to remind herself that she is doing this out of idealism. The soft-spoken 28-year-old is a campaign volunteer for the Russian opposition in regional elections scheduled for this Sunday, and things are not going well. “People react negatively to us,” says Svetlana as she tries to hand out flyers for RPR Parnas, a party co-chaired by Boris Nemtsov, the veteran opposition leader shot dead earlier this year. “The relentless propaganda works and people have it in their brains that we are the fifth column.” A few days ago, two women asked Svetlana why there were Russian flags on top of her stand and suggested that the party should instead fly American ones since it was a US lackey. Sunday’s elections, in which 16 regions will choose governors and 14 will select parliaments, illustrate just how far president Vladimir Putin has progressed in hollowing out the country’s democratic institutions during his 15 years in power, and how resigned to that the population has become.

Russia: Liberals blast Russian election law as ‘medieval,’ suggest radical changes | RT

The leader of the Yabloko party has told reporters that Russia must abandon the current practice of political parties presenting supporters’ signatures before elections to prove their popularity, saying it was both obsolete and prone to rigging. Sergey Mitrokhin told reporters in Novosibirsk on Monday that his party supported the cancelation of pre-electoral signature collection for all political parties. He commented that this part of Russian election law is “medieval.” The press conference was held in connection with the next nationwide election on September 13. This is when 11 Russian regions will elect legislatures, 21 heads of regions will be elected by a direct vote, and four more by voting in regional parliaments. He added that Yabloko, one of the oldest parties in Russia, has always supported greater equality for all political groups.

Russia: Opposition faces an uphill struggle against Kremlin and Vladimir Putin | Telegraph

Just before Ilya Yashin launched into his second stump speech of the day, two sullen youths began to hand out fliers accusing him of being paid by the United States to destroy Russia from within. It was ten days before elections to the Kostroma region’s parliament, and the arrival of the young members of an organisation called “Patriots of Russia” – and a subsequent accusation of theft against one of Mr Yashin’s activists – was by now a routine part of the campaign trail. “That is small beer. They try something like it every day,” Mr Yashin said. “It’s a form of psychological pressure. But we got used to that a long time ago.” Fresh faced, short, and slight of build, Mr Yashin, 32, is already a veteran of Russian opposition politics – and he knows a thing or two about psychological pressure. During the 2000s, he campaigned for the once-popular democratic parties that have seen their share of the vote shrink with each election under Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian but popular rule. In late 2011, he was one of several leaders of a surge of anti-Kremlin protests – and endured the subsequent crackdown, which saw arrests, apartment searches, and several allies sent to prison.

Russia: Can Russia’s only independent election monitor survive Kremlin pressure? | Christian Science Monitor

Golos, Russia’s only grassroots election-monitoring organization, has been fighting an exhausting battle to prove it does not receive foreign funding. Otherwise, it would have to self-describe as a “foreign agent” – a term that connotes “spy” in Russian. But even though the organization has won some significant court victories, including a Constitutional Court order to lift the onerous label they were saddled with, Golos seems no closer to fielding its usual teams of observers when Russia’s next cycle of elections kicks off, with regional polls in October. Now, members of Golos and other nongovernmental organizations in similar conflict with the government are asking: Are there any terms under which the Kremlin will allow such a group to do its appointed job? “The basic problem is that authorities are not happy with what Golos does,” says Andrei Buzin, an analyst with Golos. “It’s this type of activity, making conclusions, publishing results, that they just don’t like.”

Russia: United Russia will not use Putin’s image in next elections | RT

Russia’s ruling parliamentary party, which has always based its policies on supporting Vladimir Putin, will not ask the president to allow them use his image in the 2016 elections campaign, a business daily reports. Kommersant newspaper quoted unnamed sources in United Russia as saying that its presidium has already chosen five people who will top the party’s lists in the forthcoming primaries, and the president was not among them. The sources did not disclose the names of these politicians. They also said that most of the places in the lists would be reserved for regional party leaders, as this would make the primaries “democratic to the maximum.” United Russia officials also told Kommersant that the party did not want to involve Putin in its election campaign in order to protect the president from possible damage to his political rating, because it was difficult to forecast how many voters would lend their support to the party this time around.

Russia: Russian Opposition Blocked From Standing in Local Elections | Newsweek

Russia’s joint Democratic Coalition, led by renowned anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny and the supporters of the late opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, have been refused the right to run for election across all the regions where they opted to campaign on the grounds of irregularities in their applications, Russian national daily Kommersant reports. Local council elections in Russia will be held in September and the Democratic Coalition, which is made up of several of the biggest opposition movements to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime, was due to contest four constituencies.

Russia: Opposition activists on hunger strike after election disqualification | The Guardian

Three Russia opposition activists have gone on hunger strike in Novosibirsk to protest against the authorities’ decision to disqualify them from a local election. Leonid Volkov, campaign chief for the opposition Democratic Coalition, and candidates Yegor Savin and Sergei Boyko began the strike on Tuesday after the election commission in Russia’s third-largest city didn’t accept the signatures they submitted to register to run in the upcoming local legislature vote.

Russia: Murder, Poisoning, Raids: It’s Election Season in Russia | Bloomberg

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the only billionaire jailed by Vladimir Putin, is assembling an army of volunteers to challenge the electoral system that supports his nemesis. Accusations of murder and poisoning are already flying. Khodorkovsky, freed 18 months ago, has said he hopes to spark a palace coup from self-imposed exile in Switzerland, exploiting what he predicts will be rising discontent with a contracting economy. He’s starting with a project to hunt for violations in the first major elections Putin and his ruling United Russia party will face since the president returned to the Kremlin in 2012 after a four-year stint as prime minister.

Russia: Putin brings forward parliamentary elections | AFP

President Vladimir Putin has signed off on a law that brings next year’s Russian parliamentary elections forward by three months, a move some commentators said gives an unfair advantage to pro-Kremlin parties. “The election of the seventh convocation of State Duma deputies will take place on the third Sunday of September 2016,” the Kremlin said in a statement on Wednesday. Parliamentary elections were initially scheduled to take place in December 2016. Supporters of the initiative, including State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin, have said an early election would ensure continuity between the adoption and implementation of the 2017 budget. Critics of the move have argued it is unconstitutional and unfairly plays into the hands of the Kremlin.

Russia: Crackdown on Moscow Election Monitors | Newsweek

Russian authorities on July 7 searched the Moscow office of the Golos Association, the country’s leading election-monitoring organization, and the homes of four Golos members, Human Rights Watch reports. The searches appeared to be part of a broader government crackdown on the independent monitoring group. Criminal investigators searched the apartments of Grigory Melkonyants and Roman Udot, co-chairs of Golos; Tatyana Troinova, the executive director; and Valentina Denisenko, a former staff member. Later that day, investigators searched the Moscow office.

Russia: Elections Commission Lays Down New Rules for Bloggers | The Moscow Times

Russia’s Central Elections Commission approved a set of new rules Wednesday for popular bloggers during election campaigns, the Kommersant newspaper reported. Under the new rules, bloggers with web pages visited by more than 3,000 people a day must restrict any propaganda to the campaign period limits, and post “objective and verifiable information about candidates and parties that doesn’t infringe on candidates’ equality,” the report said.

Russia: Police raids homes, offices of election monitors: lawyer | AFP

Russian police on Tuesday raided the offices of election watchdog Golos as well as the homes of its employees, a lawyer for the group said, amid an ever-increasing crackdown on independent voices in the country. The searches, which came ahead of regional elections this autumn, coincided with an unveiling by Russian authorities of the first 12 American and other groups to be likely put on the list of “undesirable” organisations. On Tuesday, police raided the homes of several Golos employees, including the apartment of senior executive Grigory Melkonyants and confiscated equipment including computers. “They are searching the offices as we speak,” a Golos lawyer, Olga Gnezdilova, told AFP.

Russia: Russia’s Constitutional Court OKs Early Elections | RFE/RL

Russia’s Constitutional Court has upheld the legality of early parliamentary elections, clearing the way for lawmakers to vote on bringing forward next year’s State Duma elections by three months. The court said the initiative was constitutional so long as election dates were not regularly shifted. The effort to bring forward the 2016 elections, from December to September 18, is expected to come to a vote on July 3. The bill has strong backing from deputies for the United Russia, A Just Russia, and ultranationalist Liberal Democratic parties.

Russia: Lawmakers approve early parliamentary vote in 2016 | Associated Press

Lawmakers in Russia’s Kremlin-controlled parliament on Friday gave tentative approval to a bill that would move up next year’s parliamentary election by three months, a tactic seen by critics as an attempt to weaken the opposition. The lower house voted 339-101 with one abstention Friday to approve the bill in the first of three readings. It would also need to be approved by the equally-docile upper house and signed by President Vladimir Putin.

Russia: Move to Shift Vote for Russian Duma Seen Benefitting Putin | Wall Street Journal

Senior ruling-party politicians are throwing their weight behind a proposal to move Russia’s next parliamentary elections up three months to September 2016, a shift that could put opposition candidates at a further disadvantage by relegating the campaign to vacation season. Sergei Naryshkin, leader of parliament’s lower chamber and a member of President Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party, on Thursday called the rescheduling proposal “possible and even wise,” according to the Interfax news agency. The reason he gave was that budgets are passed in the fall and it would make more sense to elect new lawmakers beforehand.

Russia: Opposition coalition to contest regional polls | BBC

Russia’s main opposition groups say they will combine forces to fight for election in three regions this autumn. They are hoping for a springboard for the 2016 national parliamentary vote. The “democratic coalition” was formed last weekend to unite six parties and groups under the banner of RPR-Parnas, the party of murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. The coalition includes the party of anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, but he cannot run for office. He is serving a suspended prison sentence in an embezzlement case that he argues was fabricated.

Russia: Local elections: a sign of things to come in Russia? | The Washington Post

On Sept. 14, Russia held a spate of local elections. Thirty of 85 Russian regions held gubernatorial elections, residents of Crimea elected a new regional legislature, and Muscovites voted in municipal elections. These elections are interesting because they provide a bellwether for current protest sentiment levels and perhaps even an early preview of parliamentary elections that are due to take place in 2016. Furthermore, this is also the first time that Crimea has voted as part of Russia since being annexed in March. Gubernatorial elections were reinstated in 2012 as a major concession to a mass protest movement that for a time sent tremors through Russia’s political establishment in 2011-2012 and seemed to threaten the very stability of Vladimir Putin’s regime. The current round of elections confirms once again that the level of protest sentiment remains low across Russia and that the federal government is able to keep a firm lid on inter-elite conflict in the provinces, which back in the 1990s threatened the country’s territorial integrity. First, local elections failed to generate much public interest or discussion even in the country’s capital where many residents pay close attention to politics. Turnout was low—rarely exceeding 40 percent—and candidates nominated by the ruling United Russia party won in 28 of the 30 provinces that held gubernatorial elections (an independent won in Kirov oblast and a Communist in Orlov). Notably, incumbents won in all 30 provinces, and all of them won in the first round with levels of voter support ranging from 50.6 percent in Altai to Soviet-style 91.3 percent in Samara oblast. In other words, government candidates ran almost unopposed; all of them had been endorsed by president Putin personally shortly in the run up to the election.

Russia: Election shows Kremlin’s grip on Russian regions | Reuters

The ruling United Russia party and state-backed candidates won decisive victories in Russian regional elections at the weekend in what Kremlin critics said was the result of vote-rigging and a stifling political climate. Of 85 regional governors, the 29 who were up for re-election on Sunday were either members of the ruling party or backed by the Kremlin. All won their races easily, with more than half getting more than 80 percent of the vote, according to the central election commission. United Russia is loyal to President Vladimir Putin. According to a popular opposition slogan coined by blogger Alexei Navalny, it is made up of “crooks and thieves”. Elections to local parliaments in 84 of the 85 regions also handed victory to mainly pro-Kremlin politicians. “The current political system does not allow electoral victory for honest independent candidates,” Navalny, who is under house arrest, wrote in a note posted on his website after Sunday’s vote.

Russia: Crimean critics call foul as region votes in first Russian election | Reuters

Six months after Russia annexed Crimea, residents of the Black Sea peninsula cast their first votes in a Russian election – an election many of them are calling unfair and undemocratic. Campaigning before Sunday’s local and regional elections was characterised by favoritism towards the ruling party loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin and repression of its opponents, according to residents in Crimea who spoke to Reuters by telephone. Crimean politics has come to resemble the Soviet political landscape since Russia annexed Crimea in March, said Andrei Brezhnev, who leads new Communist Party of Social Justice, and is the grandson of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. “Now we have no political competition either,” he said. His party is competing in the regional parliamentary race and in a poll for one of the main cities, Sevastopol. People had been forced to sign up for membership in the pro-Putin United Russia Party before the vote, he said. “About two months ago everybody, wholesale, was forced to ‘voluntarily’ sign up for membership in United Russia here – officials, heads of local administrations, shops directors, medical workers,” he said. “Suddenly, in three months everything became United Russia here.”

Russia: Moscow city elections leave little room for Russian opposition | The Washington Post

A year ago, Russia’s opposition thought the elections taking place Sunday could be a game changer. After opposition candidate Alexey Navalny’s strong second-place finish in the 2013 Moscow mayoral race, Sunday’s city council elections seemed to present a rare opportunity to grasp a place in Russia’s political firmament. Winning a few seats could legitimatize the opposition as a real alternative to President Vladimir Putin and his allies. But that was before Navalny was put under house arrest on embezzlement charges, before Russia locked horns with the West over Ukraine, before new election laws took effect, and before the opposition fully fathomed the challenges of running local campaigns, in which anti-Putin messages hardly mattered.

Russia: ‘Most Diverse’ Elections Offer No Real Choice | The Moscow Times

An all-time record 63 parties will compete in the upcoming regional elections next month, but pundits and opposition candidates say undesirables have been purged from the lists. “The intrigue is mostly about the turnout and runners-up in the gubernatorial polls,” regional analyst Alexei Titkov of the Higher School of Economics said Thursday. “If less than 30 percent of voters turn out, it may finally trigger the long-awaited public discussion about there being something not quite right about our elections,” Titkov said by telephone. On Wednesday, candidate registration closed for the more than 5,800 local elections that will take place across 84 of 85 Russian provinces on Sept. 14, according to the Central Election Commission. Thirty governor seats are up for grabs, from St. Petersburg to the far eastern Primorye region, and 14 regional legislatures will be re-elected, including in Moscow. But not a single incumbent, Kremlin-endorsed governor risks defeat, Titkov said — mostly because electoral authorities have banned all dangerous rivals from the race.

Russia: Kremlin Seeks Research on Foreign Electoral Systems | The Moscow Times

The Department of Presidential Affairs has announced a tender for research on the electoral systems of foreign countries in a potential bid to reform Russia’s own electoral system, the Vedomosti newspaper reported Tuesday. Citing a copy of the tender’s technical requirements, Vedomosti reported that the president’s advisers on domestic policy are interested in themes including the practice of limiting citizens’ right to elect and to be elected “within the framework of democratic norms,” various electoral systems and practices for uniting electoral blocs and international practice in regulating the activities of election monitors and campaigners.

Russia: How Russia could easily hack its neighbors’ elections | Washington Post

In 2007, the Estonian government came under a massive denial-of-service attack that crippled the country’s banking, government and law enforcement infrastructure. Nobody took responsibility for the flood of bogus Internet traffic, but some suspected Russia was the culprit. Given what we know about Russia’s aggressive border policies, it’s a plausible theory. The Kremlin, after all, had a motive: Estonia had recently taken down a Soviet-era statue, and ethnic Russians were up in arms about it. If Moscow wanted to take the opportunity to meddle in Estonia’s affairs, according to research by an international team of security experts, it could do so cleanly and silently without anyone being the wiser. The attack could come via Estonia’s online voting system. Estonia’s is one of the only such ballot systems in the world, which makes it a fascinating test case for other countries or governments weighing the costs and benefits of e-voting. Unfortunately, the researchers discovered, this system is vulnerable to hacking in ways that could change the outcome of entire elections.