My first experience as an observer happened ten years ago in 2011. It was really bracing experience that changed my attitude towards government and mass media.Since then many things changed, I have much less time to spare now and election was stretched for three days making it more challenging to observe.
At first I was very skeptical and thought that I was not going to participate, but then changed my mind and volunteered to became an observer in one day out of three. So I filled the form on Golos site and waited for the response.
About two weeks before the election I was included in telegram chat of Moscow Region observers and it was very nice to have such a coordination. This time it was Yabloko party who provided us with observers status. It turned out that Communist’s party is not reliable in out region and could withdraw the status any moment.
In chat there were about 60 people, and to my poll station were assigned five people. So, independent observers covered about 10-15 poll stations.
I arrived to my station on Sunday, the last day of election. Election committee members were all teachers from the school station located and were very nice indeed most of the time. However, I found out that they didn’t know rules too much and made a lot of mistakes. They signed on other rows, forgot to return voters passports, confused ballots and so on.
But the most critical finding was that they messed up with additional voters list. Voters list are formed by different federal agencies and sometimes they missed someone or don’t update personal information and voter after name change couldn’t vote using general list. For this case there is additional list of voters. Committee based on stamp in passport that shows permanent residency could include voter in this additional list. This additional list is the several blank forms that attached together to form a book. All pages should have numbers that follows general list numbering. But in our case instead of one book they made ten(!!!) ones – five for regional and five for federal elections – and neither of them had page numbering. As a result they confused everything and at some point one of the committee member started to give voted 4 ballots with receiving only two signs in one of the book.
At Sunday I arrived to poll station at 7 am and was waiting committee for about forty minutes. So I didn’t have chance to check books before voting commence. And looked though then only by noon when they were not in use. My founding was very serious. Although it was not intentional fault, giving more than three ballots without a sign could by classified as a criminal case.
After that finding, head of the committee received an instruction from district committee to cover this case and during the obtaining results refused to show us list of voters to check his numbers. He just calculated them to get right control values, but did it wrong and they were keeping to adjust the numbers till 4 a.m.
Of course, we wrote an official complain, but neither this committee nor regional who ordered to conceal the truth took it seriously.
Having said that, I don’t think these wrongdoings had any impact on results. As I mentioned before committee was very poor prepared for the election and these mistakes were the result of their lack of knowledge.
During ballots counting (by the way we had automation system of counting – KOIB – that failed during election so we count ballots by hand) committee followed the rules and paid attention to my advices. So I have no doubts about votes distribution.
Results were rather predictable. No one except United Russia had a campaign in my city, and they win. Yabloko got only 6 votes and it also make perfect sense. I’m glad that LDRP shown much worse results than five years ago.
What really surprised me that there were plenty old men and women at poll station, who could hardly walk and had trouble ticking the name. But there were no young people at all. looks like they don’t see any of theses parties as the representative in parliament.